The moment that typifies Blue Valentine for me comes relatively early, in the first 15 minutes anyway, and finds thirtyish Cindy (Michelle Williams) arriving late to her daughter’s Independence Day recital. She has just, on the way home from work, found the family’s lost dog, dead on the side of the road. As she settles […]
Deprived of context, the first scene of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, makes pretty much no damn sense and it is nevertheless somehow discomfiting and unnerving – and as matter of fact, context doesn’t end up mattering very much, for although we learn a […]
The five films of director Darren Aronofsky have covered more conceptual and visually idiomatic ground than the entire careers of filmmakers with five times the output: a surpassingly cheap and grimy thriller about a paranoid mathetmatician, a whirling two-hour music video about drug addiction, a CGI-addled fantasia on the meaning of time, mortality and identity, […]
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, […]
Nick Davis probably didn’t think that he’d be using his Carry On Campaign donation as a means of extending the Summer of Blood, but that’s just how things work ed out. At least he had the sense to pick the mostly weirdly artsy film to ever be branded a scum-sucking horror movie. From among the […]
I Am Love, a film birthed out of years and years of conversations between actress Tilda Swinton and director Luca Guadagnino, is a basket of contradictions: it is at once a heaving mess of hugely melodramatic situations and emotions and visual cues that are at times presented with inordinate subtlety, and it all hinges on […]
For the second time this year (Shutter Island was the first), we come across a film with a twist ending that’s so terrifically obvious that you almost can’t help but assume the filmmakers meant for us to figure it out beforehand; and at the same time, it’s rather difficult to actually discuss how the film […]
“Fucking movies! Fucking overpaid, fucking unhappy childhood fuckers, fucking movie fucking fuckers.” -Lee Bright (Catherine Keener) If you share with me a healthy love for a certain kind of artistic indiscipline – a willingness to give a hearty “piss off!” to the money-men and the more lackadaisical bourgeois members of the receiving public, in favor […]
Michael Haneke, the art house-beloved German director probably best-known for Funny Games and Caché, has something of a reputation as a provocateur (probably because of… Funny Games and Caché) that he doesn’t quite deserve. Not because his films aren’t sometimes provocations; but that is, I think, incidental. Better to say that his is a filmmaker […]
Antichrist opens with a prologue shot in drop-dead gorgeous black and white by Anthony Dod Mantle, taking place entirely in slow motion as a piece from Handel’s opera Rinaldo, and depicting an unnamed couple played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg having what looks to be pretty fantastic sex (for the most explicit bits they […]
The story of Kore-Eda Hirokazu’s Air Doll at the Chicago Film Festival is a hectic one: announced even before the full schedule came out, if my memory serves, it’s three screenings sold well until some five days before the first one was scheduled, when it was found that the print wouldn’t arrive on time, and […]
After the befuddlement and irritation that greeted The Portrait of a Lady and Holy Smoke, 2003 saw Jane Campion receiving her worst reviews yet for In the Cut, a serial killer thriller adapted from the 1995 novel by Susanna Moore, who co-wrote the screenplay with Campion. The plot was too contrived and confused, we were […]
