By turns triumphant and obnoxiously opaque, My Joy is at once terribly difficult to come to grips with, and impossible to shake, and it’s both of these things for very much the same reason. There are two halves to the film, which is not the least of the reasons it’s so wholly inscrutable, and the […]

The coming-of-age drama Sandcastle is busy enough, and dense enough, that it feels a great deal better than is the case, strictly speaking and trying to be objective about it. Truthfully, is is not a particularly adventurous film in a great many ways, fighting a sometimes losing battle with writer-director Boo Junfeng’s inexperience and fixation […]

Though knee-jerk anti-remakism is not one of the most intellectually sound positions one can hold, it’s still the case that attempting to remake a film is a dangerous thing, and not to be done lightly. The classic argument is that you should only remake a film with a good premise that didn’t work very well […]

I would dearly love, just once, to see a French movie that depicts sex as a warm, joyful experience, one that leaves all participants feeling fulfilled and better about themselves and life. But that day is probably never going to come, and as long as the country’s filmmakers would rather depict sex as a twisted, […]

One would assume that an international film star with the appeal and cult of Jackie Chan would not have much if any trouble getting his way; and yet the path leading to Little Big Soldier, which premiered in Asia in the winter of 2010 and has yet to secure a proper release across most of […]

Happily, my second run-in with the Romanian New Wave at the 46th Chicago International Film Festival was a great deal more successful than my first. The fourth film from writer-director Radu Muntean – though the first given even the remotest push amongst we English-speakers – Tuesday, After Christmas is not at the tip-top of the […]

Romanian filmmaking, as everybody with more than a passing interest in international cinema already knows, has blown up in the last few years, becoming the hot New Wave of the moment (and in the process, robbing the nascent Korean New Wave of oxygen; but now is not the time for that). All the best festivals […]

Immediately after viewing Disney’s awards-hopeful Secretariat, I happened to meet a friend whose first question about the film was to know if, as promised, it is The Blind Side – an inspirational sports movie of virtually no aesthetic importance starring a woman who, for reasons best left unexplored, has been anointed as “owed” an Oscar […]

There was a time when the national cinema of Great Britain was an unfriendly place for horror films; when the moral guardians of that quintessentially backwards-looking country gnashed their teeth and looked with the deepest scorn at any movie which tried to titillate and thrill the average moviegoer with blood and guts and a healthy […]

Let Me In is the best English-language vampire movie in ages. Ages. That must not be denied (though with competition like Twilight, we must ask ourselves: is it that big of an achievement). If it suffers, it is only because of 2008’s Let the Right One In, the best vampire film, irrespective of language (it’s […]

So habituated had I become to steeling myself against yet another disappointment from the once-brilliant Woody Allen, who as we all know has tilted deeply into scattershot demi-irrelevance in the past 15 years or so, that when his latest film opened with a distinctly peevish narrator (Zak Orth) informing us, “Shakespeare said life was all […]

Four years ago, Davis Guggenheim made one of the most spectacularly successful documentaries of all time, An Inconvenient Truth: critically beloved, a box-office smash as such things go, the winner of a great many awards, and it was the first paving stone in the road to Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Price. A hard act to […]