The release of Hammer’s seventh film in their increasingly-discontinuous Dracula series was preceded by two big pieces of news, one of them exciting. That was the announcement that for the first time in fourteen years, Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula would be set against his greatest opponent of all, Peter Cushing’s Professor Van Helsing. The other […]
Idiots and Angels is the latest feature by animator Bill Plympton (whose newest short, “Hot Dog”, was very recently reviewed on this blog), and like all of his work, it’s clearly and exasperatingly the work of an auteur: the great conundrum of Plympton’s work is that half of the animation buffs who make up essentially […]
If it only took a tightly-constructed screenplay full of endless meta-logic and self-reference, then Synecdoche, New York would be a great movie. And if it only took marrying such a screenplay with a dozen or so supremely poetic images to make a great movie, then Synecdoche, New York would still be a great movie. But […]
You don’t get to describe a film as a farcical socialist thriller very often, but then most films aren’t like Berlin – 1st of May, a sort of anthology film following three intertwined adventures in the city of Berlin. I say “sort of” an anthology, because unlike the traditional example of the form, this isn’t […]
Winner of the 2008 Camera d’Or at Cannes, Hunger, the first proper narrative feature directed by British artist Steve McQueen, is without question one of the most self-assured first films to come out in ages – among the best debuts for an English-language filmmaker in this decade, along with David Gordon Green’s George Washington and […]
To be entirely fair, it’s more than a little impressive that Mundruczó Kornél’s Delta was completed at all, no matter how underdone the final project feels. Back in 2006, the film was about half-finished when Bertók Lajos, the actor playing the main character, died suddenly, and it took close on to a year for production […]
The Song of Sparrows is an easy, charming crowd-pleaser, produced by Iran’s resident master of crowd-pleasers, Majid Majidi (whose Children of Heaven was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, making it perhaps unsurprising that Song of Sparrows was just announced as Iran’s submission for that category this year). None of which should be […]
Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau’s messy epic-length study of the political radicals of the 1960s and what happened after, Born in ’68 doesn’t commit the great sin typical of films about that era, which is to suggest that the ’60s were the greatest and most beautiful moment in human history, and that we shall never […]
By custom, fans of Hammer Film Productions in general, and of the Hammer Dracula cycle in particular, tend to regard Scars of Dracula as an exceptionally bad motion picture. I’m not completely certain that I agree with that. Not that Scars of Dracula is a good motion picture – without a doubt, it’s the worst […]
First, the disclaimer. Part of going to a film festival is recognising that sometimes things get messed up: prints don’t show, screening times are pushed at the last minute, et cetera. Thus it happens that there was something wrong with the projection when I saw Juhn Jaihong’s Beautiful. First, there was a stretch of about […]
Word on the street after the Berlinale was that French director Erick Zonca’s English language debut, Julia, was either an homage to the films of John Cassavetes (to those who liked it) or a pitiful tinkering with Cassavetes’s style (to those who hated it, and sometimes quite viscerally). Maybe it’s just because I was looking […]
Lousy history, absolutely perfect filmmaking. That, in a nutshell, is Oliver Stone’s JFK, one of the most contentious movies in cinema history. If only it had been about a fictional event, say, the quest to uncover a government conspiracy about aliens (man, did The X-Files ever steal both style and content from JFK), it could […]
