Sometimes I amuse myself with this little game: figure out why an actor decided to sign on to a particular film. It’s often dismayingly easy, whether the actor is bad (Chris Tucker = the money), brilliant (Philip Seymour Hoffman = the money), halfway decent (Christopher Lee = the money, the money, personal affection for J.R.R. […]
Check out the sidebar: yes, that perfect “bang for your buck” rating does mean I think you should see Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and yes, the star rating does mean that I thought it was at least somewhat awful. In point of fact, those two positions are intimately related. We all know that there are […]
There is a certain kind of writer-director that emphasises the first half of that equation: write a great script and then just slap it up on the screen. Woody Allen is the godfather of this mentality (though he is not always beholden to it); men like Barry Levinson is its elder statesman; M. Night Shyamalan […]
It’s unfortunate the way that the sub-Saharan African continent gets all kind lumped together, and so we have people talking about “Africa this” or “Africa that” without any regard to the 46 countries that make up the continent. At its worst extreme, this results in a sort of First World inability to conceive of African […]
The Aughts have not been kind to the once-mighty John Sayles. From the winking screenplays for Piranha and The Howling to his directorial work including an extraordinary 12-year run from Matewan to Limbo, it really did seem like he was incapable of making movies that weren’t at least interesting, when they weren’t outright masterpieces. But […]
I haven’t seen all that many films by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, but based on what I have seen, Flight of the Red Balloon qualifies as his most action-packed work yet, given that it has a plot for pretty much all of its running time. I snark, but from love. More damningly, I haven’t ever seen Albert […]
My first intention had been to start out with a little riff about being confused by how The Diving Bell and the Butterfly seems like it must be a biopic, but there are no musicians taking drugs, so it just can’t be. But I decided that missed the point a little bit, and I would […]
Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light is a decidedly unconventional motion picture, playing by so few of the rules that govern moviemaking, whether commercial or “art” films, that I feel almost uncomfortable calling it a movie at all. Certainly there are all the usual paradigms about cinematography does this, editing does that, writing does the other thing, […]
What’s great about film festivals: I Served the King of England started late and I had to leave without waiting to attend director Jiří Menzel’s Q&A (not that Q&A’s are ever really worthwhile), but I as I snuck out of the theater, I got to see him, from a distance of about 8 inches as […]
As of right now, my favorite director that you’ve never heard of is Roy Andersson, a Swedish director of ash-dry comedies whose glacial pace of output rivals that of Stanley Kubrick.* His last film, 2000’s Songs from the Second Floor, was a miraculous bit of drollery in celebration of the human capacity to suffer without […]
The festival and art house crowd might be excused for declaring a Romanian New Wave on the basis of what amounts to just three films in as many years, for those three films are all pretty amazing: Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, winner of the 2005 Un Certain Regard at Cannes; Corneliu Porumboiu’s […]
Ah, Asia Argento! I am not persuaded that she is a good actress, in the way that we customarily mean ‘good,” but she is an unnervingly perfect movie star: it is impossible to look at anything else when she is onscreen. She is electric in all things she does. Lately, she’s been doing costume dramas, […]
