For about 100 of its 108 minutes, the Australian cop movie Noise rolls along smooth as silk, less a procedural and more a look into two minds affected in altogether different ways by a miserable crime, a perfectly efficient construct that hardly seems to go by at all, so effortless is it. Then it has […]
From time to time I stumble across a movie that I really just don’t know what to make of. An example: La León, an Argentinian/French co-production and the feature debut of writer-director Santiago Otheguy, and winner of a special mention at the Berlinale. It’s the last of those that makes me wonder if there’s something […]
A director (Ang Lee) who I love, a lead actor (Tony Leung) who I adore, and a cinematographer who I worship (Rodrigo Prieto) working in one of my consistently favorite genres (WWII resistance thriller), and Lust, Caution has the temerity to be a bit of a washout? It’s not just a disappointment, it feels like […]
There are some words that I try never to use when describing any movie – try, I say, and often I do not succeed – “poetic,” “mystic,” “hazy,” “dreamy,” words like that. I want to use every single one of them in discussing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. For you […]
The earliest movies were what we would now call documentaries: real people going on about their business in front of a camera. Indeed, they were more “documentary” than most modern examples of the form, which usually look at some event of subculture or individual in the context of a narrative as well-defined as anything to […]
On the one hand, I had one of those great film festival moments with Scream of the Ants, where the print of the movie was caught in the mail and so we had to watch a screener DVD. On the other hand, a screener DVD was self-evidently not the best way to see the film, […]
(An FYI: the reviews will be occasionally shorter and shallower than we’re all used to, as I see 3-4 movies a day and have little time at my computer. Here is the first example). I think that “fable” is an awfully convenient word to use, when you want to say “this is a frankly unbelievable […]
About one-third of the way through the Ian Curtis biopic Control, I was beginning to get a little confused about why it wasn’t about Ian Curtis per se: it seemed instead to be a story about a fairly anonymous kid who got in over his head, like a lot of kids do. By the time […]
Anyone who is paying attention knows what to expect from a Wes Anderson film: quirky, hyperstylised characters speaking quirky, hyperstylised dialogue as the move on straight lines through aggressively precise compositions filled with highly detailed and deliberately artificial set design, variations of the Futura sans serif font plastered on every surface that a font can […]
I am trying very hard to keep my philosophical objections to Into the Wild from leaving me incapable of thinking critically about its actual quality as a film, and I’m finding it very difficult; writer-director Sean Penn is clearly very invested in his themes, and very anxious that we the audience should be overwhelmed by […]
Wes Anderson, new media titan that he is, has released a short film unto the internets: Hotel Chevalier, the prologue to his about-to-open The Darjeeling Limited. Short version: it’s absolutely the best thing he’s done since Rushmore (yes, even better than that extraordinary American Express ad from last year). Long version: Anderson is nothing if […]
After much inner struggle, I have to be honest and admit that I really don’t know what to do about The Kingdom. On the one hand, in the moments that work it’s devastating, but I can’t shake the sense that it’s all a little sleazy and exploitative. At its heart, it’s a film about the […]
