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 […]

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 […]

Most of us would not, I suspect, look at the 17-year reign of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and then the branch of astronomy concerned with the study of stellar remnants and the origin of heavy elements, and say to ourselves, “You know, those two things seem to me like two sides of the same coin”. […]

There is what we might call the “Dirty Harry Rule of Sequels”, except that I’m not at all sure that there are more than just the two examples I’m about to name, and two isn’t enough for a rule. BUT ANYWAY, when that movie came out in 1971, it was famously described as fascist, and […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/7 & 10/8 World premiere: 30 September, 2011, Biarritz Latin Film Festival There is something about animation: a way it has of making everything it touches seem more creative and abstract, maybe, with the result being that stories which would be entirely uncompelling in live action get to cheat their way into […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/7 & 10/8 & 10/15 World Premiere: 12 August, 2011, Festival de Cinema de Gramado One of the unalloyed delights of any film festival of a decent size & in possession of a well-appointed selection committee is that it gives you a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see things you otherwise might never have […]

There’s a lazy critical shorthand that goes thusly: “Movie X is like Disparate Element A meets Disparate Element B!” It is a contemptible way to reduce movies to their most superficial elements, playing as little more than the writer’s way of proving his superior knowledge of art history. Lazy and contemptible or not, I’m about […]

Let this not be the spot for grousing about the Academy Awards, save for mentioning in the most off-hand way I can that I’ve now seen four of the five nominees for the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and the winner, The Secret in Their Eyes, is the fourth-best of them. I phrase […]

If the 2007 Brazilian cops-and-druglords flick Elite Squad got any kind of U.S. release, I completely missed it. But if it didn’t, I imagine it’s not going to, at least not to judge from the Region 1 DVD that got released in October, something I learned completely by accident a little while ago. Maybe it’s […]

From time to time I stumble across a movie that I really just don’t know what to make of. An example: La León, an Argentinian/French co-production and the feature debut of writer-director Santiago Otheguy, and winner of a special mention at the Berlinale. It’s the last of those that makes me wonder if there’s something […]

(An FYI: the reviews will be occasionally shorter and shallower than we’re all used to, as I see 3-4 movies a day and have little time at my computer. Here is the first example). I think that “fable” is an awfully convenient word to use, when you want to say “this is a frankly unbelievable […]

Here’s a weird little film: the Spanish/Peruvian coproduction Madeinusa, by first-time writer/director Claudia Llosa. What starts out looking like an ethnographic story of the religious customs of a town in the back of beyond in Peru turns, rather quickly, into a mash-up between Twin Peaks and The Wicker Man. The story is immaterial: it is […]