Reviews
Fighting's chief auteur might be producer Kevin Misher, who also helped greenlight the first Fast and the Furious movie. Logically wanting to replicate that film's massive success outside of the franchise, he sought another illicit world of extreme hetero recreation.
If The Soloist connects with audiences, he’d do well to push the long takes and odd visual tics sprinkled through his first three features as far as they can go. After all, he’s come this far, and Hollywood can always use more true eccentrics.
Though the spectator may be occasionally alarmed or confused by his behavior, the South Philadelphia muralist, mosaicist, and street artist Isaiah Zagar is more of a modernist than a schizophrenic.
So Yong Kim’s cinema can break your heart. Not by invoking the usual tearjerking music swells and dramatic crescendos, but by constructing narratives authentically attuned to the behavioral and emotional rhythms of particular age groups, from childhood to teenage years.
l Divo seems, to these foreign eyes, an unnecessarily demonic affair, and the heavy thumb that Sorrentino keeps on his characters often makes his drama inert.
With Lemon Tree Riklis aspires slightly higher, focusing on a practical deadlock in another geographical twilight zone: a fight over a lemon tree grove placed on the green line border between Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Part tribute to A Chorus Line creator Michael Bennett and part comparative chronicle of both the 1975 original and 2006 Broadway revival of his Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, Every Little Step covers a lot of ground in 90 minutes.
Not every chintzy Hollywood comedy that comes down the pike need be held up as an example of the State of Contemporary Entertainment, but a film like Jody Hill’s pretend-flippant, zeitgeist-baiting Observe and Report practically begs for serious consideration.
The rhythms of this story, while ploddingly familiar, are made digestible by Caine’s rapport with Milner—not exceptional in itself, but credibly touching enough without being cloyingly sentimental.
With his likeable, sentimental narratives, Majidi has been somewhat simple to write off, then, as his takes on family and tradition cross cultural borders with ease, resulting in some critics’ accusations of patronization, if not moralism.
Dreams and aspirations linger below the dusty surface of Tulpan, and each of its characters expresses a secret desire for something that seems to lie just beyond the arid landscape's distant horizon.
