Reviews
To say that Fendrik has borrowed this style from the Dardenne brothers is both to parrot the standard critical line on the film and also to tell the truth. And while handheld observational camerawork surely didn’t begin with La Promesse, the prevalence of this style in so much of what we might call “festival-circuit” cinema speaks to the brothers’ powerful aesthetic—and commercial—influence.
Documentary memoirs are getting out of hand. All too often these days what passes for nonfiction filmmaking is a training a tripod on one’s own face, and unburdening oneself with eighty minutes of babble about the motivations, misgivings, and frustrations of completing a film project.
Fifty years after creating the first cinematic account of the Warsaw uprising with Kanal—a classic that put Polish cinema on the international map—octogenarian master Andrzej Wajda offers Katyn, the first film about another WWII tragedy.
While watching a Gray movie, our powers of empathy are meant to be in full gear, and our cynicism momentarily suspended—a melodramatic imperative that has encountered its fair share of resistance from critics and audiences.
Like a stripper bounding from a child’s birthday cake, Taken, the latest lowest-common-denominator genre product from Luc Besson’s Europa Corp assembly line (Transporter, Taxi), has the ignoble distinction of being the first true Bush-era holdover to open after Obama’s inauguration.
If the survival of theater-based movie viewing rests, as some argue, on the proliferation of more-cinema-than-cinema technologies like IMAX and 3-D, then we could do much worse than a landscape of features as painstakingly and winningly realized as Henry Selick’s stereoscopic 3-D puppet show.
Given its pedigree, it’s surprising that The Panic in Needle Park has been so overlooked in the decades since its 1971 release.
Set inside a majestic Art Deco movie house in exquisitely grimy disrepair, with airy, labyrinthine stairwells and damp, dark screening rooms, the film finds surprises around every corner yet preserves the building’s mystery even after 85 exhaustive minutes.
Like many other modestly budgeted American indies, Jenkins’s film follows two people getting to know each other, as they wander an expressive cityscape, over the course of one day—aloofness gives way to intimacy, flirtation transitions into intellectual probing, daytime turns to night.
The trend may have originated with Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave, but there’s been a distinct thematic shift in horror films over the past decade or so, from the struggle between good and evil to the revelation of the evil that apparently resides in all of us.