Argo, the third film directed by Ben Affleck in his “look, I’m a confident, reliable nuts-and-bolts craftsman!” phase, is a solid, steady, well-constructed political-tinged thriller. “Like they don’t make ’em anymore” is what you’re supposed to say next, except they obviously do make ’em, because by all the available evidence, Argo was made. The difference […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/17 & 10/20World premiere: 21 April, 2012, Tribeca Film Festival If you had asked me, in the late 1990s, if I had ever expected to feel sorry for Selma Blair, I would literally not have understood what you meant. So for that, I owe In Their Skin (which has previously done time […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/17 & 10/20 & 10/21 World premiere: 26 September, 2012, San Sebastian International Film Festival If you look at at the normal sources – IMDb, Wikipedia – you’ll find (at least as of this writing) that Rhino Season is described as an Iranian film, which is an incredibly, specifically wrong statement. Rhino […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/16 & 10/17 & 10/20WORLD PREMIERE One of the beautiful things about internationally-minded film festivals is that provide a window into unfamiliar cultures, by bringing to one’s attention the smaller sort of foreign film than the kind likely to get a widespread international release; and in so doing, reveal that the prestigious […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/16 & 10/19 & 10/22Winner of the Chicago Award for best project by a Chicago filmmakerWorld premiere: 23 April, 2012, Tribeca Film Festival There is a moment in Consuming Spirits in which two characters, having just performed a rather indifferently-received set of songs at the only bar of note in their tiny […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/16 & 10/21 & 10/21World premiere: 2 July, 2012, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival While watching The Bella Vista, I was turned off by it completely; a couple of hours later, I had mellowed to not really caring one way or another; and writing this, I find its commitment to violating the […]
The first thing is, like so many movies before it, Seven Psychopaths is not the movie you’ve been led to believe it is by the marketing campaign. Which goes out of its way to identify seven characters played by seven more-or-less name actors, and imply that they are the title characters. This is not the […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/21 & 10/19 World premiere: 18 May, 2012, Cannes Film Festival After much consideration, and carefully reviewing the exact circumstances of its making, I still have no idea what Mekong Hotel, the sixth, and at 61 minutes, the shortest, feature film made by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s, is “about”. Which […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/13 & 10/16 World premiere: 10 February, 2012, Berlin International Film Festival The scenario underlying Tey, alternately known as Aujourd’hui – it is not clear at all to me which is the more “official” title, though both words mean “today” in their native language – is too fantastic for realism, […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16 & 10/19World premiere: 23 September, 2012, San Sebastian International Film Festival Part of me wants to eschew convention and not bother with any kind of synopsis for The Cleaner, the first feature by Peruvian writer-director Adriana Saba; and I will not indulge in this wish only because I am […]
The collaboration of director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton resulted in two such exemplary horror films, among the best produced during the horror boom that coincided with World War II, that it’s easy to use their names as a shorthand for everything that the genre is capable of at its most artistic and effective […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/15World premiere: 19 May, 2012, Cannes Film Festival We do not dislike Beyond the Hills – this is as much an affirmation as a preemptive clarification. It would be quite impossible to dislike in which so much, for such a large part of the running time, is amazing. Nor do […]
