What a difference an authoritarian regime makes: to Western cinephiles, Jia Zhang-Ke is quite possibly the most well-regarded of Chinese filmmakers (certainly, he is by far the most important Sixth Generation filmmaker), while in China his works are tolerated as much as they are celebrated. Case in point: his fifth feature, Still Life, despite winning […]
Strictly as an action movie, Vantage Point undeniably hits the minimum level of gaudy watchability with its multiple explosions and its 20-minute climactic car chase scene. The minimum is awfully low, however, and it’s painfully evident that the film doesn’t want to be a gaudy action movie. It plainly wants to be a smart film […]
Michel Gondry is quickly turning into a one-man argument against auteur theory. Or rather, he is a very strong argument for the theory, given that virtually every element of his most recent films seems to come straight from his own mind. It’s just that auteur theory generally assumes that this will yield good results. I […]
The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness – irony, satire – seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality. –Susan Sontag It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever. –David St. Hubbins This is my happening […]
You know what you’re getting into pretty much the instant that Definitely, Maybe begins: William Hayes (Ryan Reynolds) voiceovers that one of his perpetual goals in life is to find the perfect song to score every moment of every day, and that on this Tuesday – he loves Tuesdays, they’re the day he gets to […]
There is no doubt in my mind that the most interesting development in cinema right now is the curious explosion of first-person camcorder movies (somebody needs to come up a name for the style soon, but not me). It seems highly unlikely that any of the three films so far made with this aesthetic – […]
Aside from having one of the most delightfully gaudy titles given to any sequel in recent years, there’s primarily one way that Step Up 2 The Streets improves upon 2006’s Step Up: significantly better dance numbers. I was going at first to write “good dance numbers,” but that seemed needlessly harsh to the first film, […]
I went to see Jumper with a female friend, who wanted to go because Hayden Christensen is pretty. I wanted to go because Rachel Bilson is pretty. Our post-film analysis concluded that because Jamie Bell is so pretty now, it makes watching him as a 13-year-old in Billy Elliot kind of awkward. So no, I […]
They tell us that the French are the greatest romancers in the world (compared to the greatest Romantics, who would of course be the Germans). To this end, I spent my Valentine’s Day watching a film directed by a French filmmaker whose 1964 masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is essentially synonymous with “gorgeously sad French […]
For a children’s movie adapted from a minor series of books and released in the dumping ground of mid-February as Valentine’s Day counter-programming, The Spiderwick Chronicles has some heavy hitters on its creative team: shot by Caleb Deschanel, edited by Spielberg’s longtime collaborator Michael Kahn, starring such actors as Mary-Louise Parker and David Strathairn, co-written […]
In one very important way, Taxi to the Dark Side seems like a failure: it isn’t new. Documentarian Alex Gibney (also responsible for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) has gathered together almost every scrap of data he could to recount in literally excruciating detail the US military’s use of torture in our war […]
Remember back in the ’80s when the lines between comedy, romance and action movies were all a bit fuzzier than they are now? Yeah, those days were great. Anyway, the ’00s are not the ’80s, and what worked in a movie 20 or 25 years ago just comes across as dissonant and unpleasant. What I […]
