Little Children is very nearly perfect; if only the script was a little better. It’s a brilliant character study and satire of suburban paranoia, marred by constant, overly literal narration and a too-neat ending that puts a lovely lace bow on a film about human sloppiness. When it works, however, it’s impossible to deny it: […]
The second of 2006’s fin de siècle magician thrillers is also the better of the two. That said, it’s not really fair to compare Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige to The Illusionist; the two films are playing entirely different games. In this case, we have a wholly effective thriller with very little at its core; but […]
For my triumphant return to blogging, I am going to try to start a fight, and here is how I shall do it: by claiming that Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers is the greatest of all contemporary World War II films. By which I do not mean it is the best film set during […]
My experience of the 42nd Chicago International Film Festival came to an end on Wednesday with a radical departure from the rest of the slate, that somehow seemed weirdly appropriate: Chicago, a 1927 comedy based on a play based on a true story that would ultimately yield two other films and a Broadway musical. It’s […]
The elephant in the room first: Capote is a better film than Infamous. The first film’s screenplay is surer in its intent and more focused, the moral stakes are higher, and there’s simply no way to compare Toby Jones’ skilled mimcry to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s colossal embodiment of the Self-Destroying Artist. On the other hand, […]
Here’s a weird little film: the Spanish/Peruvian coproduction Madeinusa, by first-time writer/director Claudia Llosa. What starts out looking like an ethnographic story of the religious customs of a town in the back of beyond in Peru turns, rather quickly, into a mash-up between Twin Peaks and The Wicker Man. The story is immaterial: it is […]
Author’s note, 2017: You know what, I bet I’d like this movie more now. I also bet I’m never going to find out. Darren Aronofsky’s third feature The Fountain is a complete mess, but it is at least an interesting mess. In this it is unlike Aronofsky’s first feature, π, which is a cluttered and […]
A throughline: only three days ago, I complained that Shortbus began and ended with the idea that sex is nice, and married that to Standard Indie Relationship Dramedy Template B-5. Now I’ve seen Princess, a film in which sex is not considered to be nice at all, and it makes Shortbus look like the finest […]
Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland is not precisely a biopic, insofar as its main character is a fictional composite. It’s not really a psychodrama, given that the brutal dictator that it takes as subject is never viewed from the “inside.” It is a study instead of the seductive appeal of pure evil – […]
The funniest movie I’ve seen all year is a satire on the state of public discourse in Romania. No wait, come back! Please? A fost sau n-a fost?, or 12:08 East of Bucharest to us Yanks (the original title translates, I believe, as Was It or Wasn’t It?, making this one of the exceedingly rare […]
The last credit at the start of Manoel de Oliveira’s Belle toujours dedicatesthe film in honor of Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, thereby suggesting that this is not to be a sequel to the 1967 Belle de jour so much as a celebration of that film. Which, more or less, turns out to be the […]
Towards the Moon with Fellini is an engaging little wisp of a movie. It’s simple to describe it as “Fellini on the set of his last movie,” but that sells it short: it’s equal parts mocumentary, EPK and window into the process of one of the cinema’s greatest eccentrics. In the beginning, American journalist Christina […]
