Reviews
“You oughta see The Passion of the Christ,” says the burned-out fortysomething stripper to the fiftysomething broken-down professional wrestler, who agrees that maybe he should, noting that its subject “sounds like one tough dude.” Kinda sorta like him, right? Then she tells him that, with his long hair, he kinda sorta looks like Jesus himself.
The challenge of importing a foreign romantic comedy is thus twofold: first, it has to compete with the appeal of the American star system; and second, it has to justify its genre-mandated frivolity in a corner of the market (“world cinema”) usually reserved for much more dour films.
Both Herman’s The Boy with the Striped Pajamas and Daldry’s The Reader feature ill-considered accents, vanilla Europudding casts, and, oddly, both focus squarely on the effects of the Holocaust not on the Jews, but on the Germans.
In the City of Sylvia, Jose Luis Guerin’s odyssey of perception, is so dedicated to getting inside the act of cosmopolitan female-watching, it might as well be called City of Women.
Each Advent, the moviegoer inevitably finds two holiday-anxiety genres under the tree: the child’s, in which an external force imperils a family, a group of orphans or a town and threatens to “stop Christmas,” and the adult’s, in which the threat to the sanctity of Christmas is the nuclear family itself.
Forget the anxiety of influence: Steven Soderbergh’s anti-epic Che is haunted from first frame to last by the anxiety of legend.
What do noir, Busby Berkeley, the blues, and funhouse fantasy have in common? As Dark Streets ultimately proves, not much.
Ages have seemingly passed since a filmmaker fashioned something inventive and exciting out of the time-travel subgenre. 2004’s brief micro indie cause celebre Primer feels a long way off now, but Spanish sci-fi entry Timecrimes brings back memories of that out-of-leftfield marvel, while going its own fresh way.
Given the strength of the source material and the pedigree of its cast and crew, Doubt may be the ultimate low-risk, high-reward prestige product, and it would be wrong for me to suggest that Shanley has produced anything less than a gripping piece of work.
As shot by Reichardt in a patient, fixed take, this makeshift breakfast has the distinct ring of a ritual. We get the sense that Wendy and Lucy have seen plenty of mornings like this one, grey and unwelcoming, attended by the giggly gawking of passing teenagers and the by-the-book hectoring of local cops.
There’s no joy to be had in enumerating the shortcomings of Adam Resurrected, an ambitious and long gestating adaptation of a much-admired novel by Yoram Kaniuk.
With references to his work in recent films by Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, and Gus Van Sant, Federico Fellini is, perhaps, making a comeback.
Night is falling as an elderly Chinese woman sits down in her armchair, faces the camera, and begins recounting her life story. In the Fifties, He Fengming was a journalist who had turned down a promising academic career to become a revolutionary.
During a time when American independent cinema either grunts elliptically under moody skies or chatters banally cross-legged on the living room floor, the purposeful, probing dialogue in Yen Tan‘s Ciao feels like a throwback to an entirely different reality.