Ever since it premiered at Cannes in 2006, Bong Joon-ho’s The Host has been the recipient of some truly glowing festival praise: “the best monster movie in decades” is not at all an uncommon sentiment. That’s over-selling it something fierce (and probably reflects the fact that Proper Critics don’t really see all that many monster […]
I am not even a little bit interested in following the lead of the whole rest of the internets, and discussing how the film version of Frank Miller’s 300 does or does not endorse the cult of violent masculinity represented by George W. Bush and the neoconservatives. That would be giving the film entirely too […]
Let nobody say that Saw III is goreless: I am in no conceivable way a lightweight about such things, but herein is a lengthy, lovingly detailed surgery scene that went pretty much as far as I could tolerate without looking away. I will admit immediately that this was the unrated edition, not the theatrical cut; […]
Because sequels are meant to be sure things at the box office, they are not often very innovative. The great majority of second films, even the good ones, are essentially just the notes of the first film played louder and bigger. In one key way, Saw II is actually a bit original, then: it clocks […]
Stripped to its bare essentials, the first Saw, from 2004, could have been a pretty great little film. Two men are trapped in a grimy bathroom, chained to pipes, a dead body lies between them. There are a handful of clues tossed around the room about what they need to do to get out, and […]
I am frankly stymied by Amazing Grace. There seems to be no doubt that it’s a willfully political film, but I can’t decide what position it takes; outwardly it has only enough political bravery to oppose the British slave trade, abolished in 1807, and isn’t that something we can all get behind? Snark aside, I […]
With two major feature films under his belt, I think it’s possible to start making some generalizations about indie writer-director Craig Brewer: he has an uncanny ability to capture community and place on film; he is gifted at using music for its narrative implications as much as for its sound; he is taken with stories […]
As everybody knows, America is obsessed with killers. I shall prove this with the following two lists: -John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy -William B. Saxbe, Ramsey Clark, Richard Thornburgh, Edward Levi What do the four names in each set have in common? If you said “the first four are serial killers, […]
The French New Wave remains, in my humble opinion, the most exciting and energetic of all film movements, because of the unmistakable joy that the directors involved had in deconstructing the mechanics of cinema. It is the most playful of all film schools; even its stories of death and betrayal and its vicious political satires […]
An admission: I feel actively guilty for not loving Indigènes (Natives, released in this country under the confoundedly meaningless title Days of Glory). It’s clearly an important film, documenting the institutionalized racism in the French army against the North African soldiers who, in a very real sense, liberated France from the Nazis. So compelling is […]
The lamest pull-quote I’ve ever seen is on the back of the DVD case for Battlefield Earth, and it goes something like this (I’m paraphrasing from memory): “Fantastic scene transitions!” In addition to being lame, it is inaccurate; the scene transitions in Battlefield Earth are in fact unusually bad. No-one can say the same of […]
A film that looks and plays like a long-lost collaboration between Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky ought to be the biggest slam dunk of an art-house masterpiece that ever was, and last summer, when the French/Turkish co-production Climates [Iklimler] by Nuri Bilge Ceylan was rounding the European festival circuit, that was pretty much […]
