There’s some real nice texturing, that’s what there is. I mean, real nice textures. In the extreme close-ups of the birds’ bodies (of which there aren’t all that many, but enough to make the point), you can see feathers that have been individually delineated, and even barbs that have been individually delineated, all of them […]

Our tour of the particularly strange little corridors of filmed adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories now takes us from the Soviet Union and its hallucinatory 1985 TV version of The Hobbit, north to Finland and that country’s 1993 adaptation of both The Hobbit AND The Lord of the Rings, a TV miniseries gathered […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/8 & 10/9World premiere: 17 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival I’ve been grappling with a bit over the entirely arbitrary question whether or not Le Havre represents a major new work by Finland’s most beloved native filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki, or if it’s merely that it’s sufficiently less minor than his last feature, […]

With Lights in the Dusk, I have seen two films by Aki Kaurismäki, and that makes me as much an expert on the director as 99.5% of the American population. The remaining 0.5% inform me that all in all, this new film is not a particularly distinguished entrant in his canon, and I’m quite sure […]