Screens at CIFF: 10/20 – Closing Night World premiere: 15 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival The Artist is wildly inconsequential. I say this not in the spirit of judgment – well, okay, it’s very much a judgment, but it’s not judgmental, and there’s a difference there. It’s a film that has virtually nothing to say […]
Here’s what really, really frustrated me about the new The Thing: it’s not completely thoughtless. On the contrary, it rather seems like the creators of this 29-years-later prequel to John Carpenter’s exemplary horror film The Thing have a good reason for every single choice they made, except that every single choice is so damn wrong […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/17 & 10/18World premiere: 14 February, 2011, Berlin Film Festival In what I hope desperately is a piece of deliberate misquotation and not just crappy subtitling (at a festival it never does to assume), one of the characters in the Russian metaphysical sci-fi love story Target early on recalls the opening moral […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16 & 10/17World premiere: 27 August, 2011, Montréal Film Festival That Chronicle of My Mother is consciously meant to be a tribute to the work of the legendary Japanese filmmakers Ozu Yasujiro is revealed through dialogue that isn’t quite so crass as to force the characters to say, “My goodness, […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/16 & 10/18World premiere: 5 August, 2011, Poland When it works, and it does so more often than not, Rafael Lewandowski’s The Mole is a well-considered, quietly ambivalent film about the scars of living in a democratic country where totalitarianism happened recently enough that not-so-old people can still remember the […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/16 & 10/17 & 10/18 World premiere: 23 June, 2011, Denmark Love Is in the Air feels like a terrible, tragic accident – like somewhere on a wet road at night, a truck containing the complete works of Baz Luhrmann hit a truck containing European urban realism, and before either of those […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/18World premiere: 13 February, 2011, Berlin Film Festival Pina Bausch was a woman who was, until very recently indeed, completely unknown to me; and it’s maybe the most concise way to explain just how good Wim Wender’s film about her work is, if I simply say that Pina – for that is […]
A remake, in 2011, of a 1984 movie with a central conflict that was embarrassingly old-fashioned by the end of the 1950s has its work cut out for it in the staying fresh and saying something for the kids out there department, and the brand-new Footloose deals with this tricky issue by, um, well… heck, […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/15World premiere: 10 November, 2010, South Korea There are a lot of storylines that you’d expect from a movie called Haunters before arriving at the one it actually possesses: a man who can turn other people into his puppets just by staring at them squares off against the only person […]
Premature Burial, the third of the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations directed by Roger Corman and released by AIP, is by common consent regarded as being the ugly stepchild of the franchise. There’s one tremendously obvious reason for this: it’s the only one of the Corman Poe pictures not starring the stalwart Vincent Price, replacing him […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/14 & 10/16World premiere: 7 October, 2010, Indonesia Here is a place that I don’t think any of us expected the present superhero movie wave to to end up going: a transgender crime fighter in a shiny leather catsuit fighting a conservative Islamic presidential candidate who wants to turn Indonesia […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/15 & 10/16World premiere: 4 September, 2010, Telluride Film Festival The reason that animated love story and 20th Century period piece Chico & Rita exists is, basically, because a documentarian, Fernando Trueba, and one of his subjects, the world-renowned designer Javier Mariscal, wanted to make a movie together. I admire […]
