Screens at CIFF: 10/16 & 10/17World premiere: 11 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival Fairy tales are of their nature an obvious place for revisionist feminist theory: the bulk of them, after all, are moral tales teaching proper behavior in pre-industrial societies where women, if they were phenomenally lucky, were permitted to speak to men other […]
It’s possible to read all sorts of things into Anna Paquin’s extraordinary performance as Lisa Cohen, the lead character in Margaret: uncertainty, moral absolutism, the desire for love, the terror at showing any emotion that might mark her as vulnerable, enthusiasm for her own growth as a person, comfort in knowing that she is the […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16 World premiere: 1 October, 2011, New York Film Festival I have seen Chicago-based indie artist Andrew Bird perform live four times, which might not sound like a lot to the music junkies out there, but it ties him for my personal record. The second of those four times is […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/13 & 10/15 World premiere: 14 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival There have been many films about the confounded lot of women in contemporary Iran (and given how incredibly shitty that lot seems to be, it’s not the sort of thing I feel compelled to complain about), and on that […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/15World premiere: 11 March, 2011, Poland 2011 is really much too late for anybody to still be amazed that there are cartoons – not “animated features”, which sounds like something stately and artistically ambitious by Miyazaki, but crude, brightly colored cartoons – made expressly for an adult audience; even so, […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/15World premiere: 16 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival It’s a kind of weird achievement that Snowtown, the debut of Australian director Justin Kurzel, starts off by promising to be one kind of incredibly distressing movie and turns into another kind of even more incredibly distressing movie entirely; sort of like […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/12 & 10/14 World premiere: 31 March, 2011, China It’s been some years since Hong Kong cinema was a cause célèbre among Western cinephiles, but if that weren’t the case, surely Johnnie To would be a name as well-regarded today as John Woo was 15 years ago. He’s responsible for […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/9 & 10/14 & 10/15World premiere: 18 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival It’s certainly too early to confidently announce the death of the Romanian New Wave, especially with Corneliu Porumboiu and Christian Mungiu still alive and well, but it doesn’t take a doomsday prophet to find that the country’s national style has […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/13 & 10/15 & 10/16 World premiere: 12 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival If I were to lay out the plot of The Slut all nice and simple, it would sound like Israel is now in the business of exporting its pornography: there’s a small farming community out by nowhere, where 35-year-old […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/13 World premiere: 14 February, 2011, Berlin Film Festival Ralph Fiennes does not, evidently, lack for bravery: the actor’s directorial debut is a Shakespearean adaptation, and one in which he, himself, plays the lead role; and it is, just to make things extra-fun, the first-ever feature version* of one of the author’s […]
I am ashamed to say that I didn’t make the connection that Real Steel is nor more nor less than Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots: The Movie until every other living person had already done so. But in my defense, that is only because I very early on got attached to thinking of it as […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/18 World premiere: 12 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival It’s not quite the first shot of We Need to Talk About Kevin (that honor goes to the image of a curtain drifting in the night wind), but it’s pretty darn close: Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton), borne aloft on a crowd […]
