Reviews
It’s as if, for decades, Eastwood has been positioning himself as a brooding man’s Leonard Zelig or Forrest Gump, a witness to all of America's wrongs who’s been trying to live them down ever since.
In the first place, The Class is a welcome corrective to a significant omission in the vast majority of junior high or high school movies—actual classroom activity.
Early in the documentary 30 Century Man, Scott Walker recollects his first visit to Sweden, in which he came to the horrific realization that vulgarity exists even among Scandinavians.
We can all agree that democracy’s messy any way you cut it, and Lurie’s filmmaking certainly follows suit; on a very concrete level, there’s just more movie here than the director seems up to juggling.
Even though the film seems a trifle proud that it’s based on fact (an opening title card informs that “The story you are about to see is true”), What Doesn’t Kill You’s experiential personal involvement does distinguish it from its generic makeup.
“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.