Sita Sings the Blues, the first feature-length movie animated and directed by Nina Paley, sometime cartoonist, graphic artist and animator, is not without its flaws, but what it lacks in absolute perfection it makes up for – and then some – in ambition and passion. First conceived in the wake of her divorce, the film […]
After directing three of the finest American films of the decade and one extraordinarily close near-miss, Clint Eastwood was probably due for a stumble. And that’s really all that I think Changeling is, a stumble, and not even a bad one: there’s quite a lot to love about Eastwood’s treatment of the grim true story […]
The winner of the Crystal Globe for best in fest at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, Terribly Happy plays a lot like many confusing detective stories that have come before it, but thanks to an unusual setting, it manages to showcase enough of its own personality that I can’t honestly […]
Tokyo! is another one of those new versions of old-fashioned anthology films that exists for no reason other than to show of a handful of short films connected by only the loosest commonality: in this case, three segments about Tokyo, although the precise definition of “about” is different for each director involved. First up is […]
In the spring of 1940, when Poland was ground zero in the tug-of-war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to gain complete control of Eastern Europe, a group of some 12,000 Polish prisoners-of-war were executed and buried in mass graves in the Katyń Forest in Smolensk Oblast. The graves were discovered by the Nazis […]
Valdís Óskarsdóttir’s Country Wedding has a remarkably avant-garde central concept that makes for a great nugget of trivia, and as it turns out, only a modestly entertaining finished project: at the start of shooting her film, she rehearsed the characters and their history and their relationships, had each of the cast members think of one […]
On paper, Of Time and the City looks to be a bad way to begin one’s exploration of the films of Terence Davies, a notoriously anti-prolific Brit who has now directed a grand total of five feature films and a trilogy of shorts in a career which began in 1976. But I didn’t know anything […]
Three of the last four weekends have seen a G-rated Disney film with essentially no value to an audience over 12 years old leading the box-office: first Beverly Hills Chihuahua, and now High School Musical 3: Senior Year, although at least this sequel to the two blockbuster Disney Channel Original Movies didn’t LIE about itself […]
On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, in Tombstone, AZ, Marshal Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and their friend John “Doc” Holliday engaged in a gunfight at the O.K. Corral with Ike and Billy Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, and Billy Claiborne, an event that quickly became one of the most legendary true […]
A slightly embarrassing confession: despite his reputation as one of the pre-eminent Chinese filmmakers of the current century, I’ve had some difficulty in the past “getting” the work of Jia Zhang-Ke, at least those films I’ve seen. To my eyes, his big breakthrough, 2000’s Platform, is an exceptionally over-praised work of no particular merit, while […]
Oh, how I’m going to hell for that post title. The final vampire picture produced by Hammer Film Productions saw the studio going out with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a comic SPROING!!! noise. At least that is the sound it makes in my head, because wow is The Legend of the 7 […]
Oh yes; Hammer Film Productions was dead, it was just a matter of everybody finally agreeing to stop humping the corpse (after 1974, a grand total of two films were released by the company: To the Devil… a Daughter in 1976, and a remake of The Lady Vanishes in 1979). I can think of no […]
