Smart Words About Cinema
Contributor
Full disclosure: I belong to that oft-referenced “cult” that rates Tarsem Singh’s The Fall as a singularly beautiful celebration of storytelling and its near-mythic power to create worlds so fantastic they could exist only in the imagination. Even Tarsem’s first film, The Cell (2000), unreeling in the fecund mind of a serial killer, contains moments of mad splendor. [...]
The best films I saw during my week at the Vancouver Film Festival were Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Béla Tarr’s incomparable The Turin Horse. Both ran two hours plus. The storytelling in the former unreels slowly, cumulatively, so mysteriously that if you don’t watch with intense concentration, you’ll miss [...]
Packed with provocative Orwellian ideas, In Time falls flat when it comes to execution. Sold as a sci-fi thriller, the film’s full of footraces and car chases but succumbs to narrative inertia, helpless to whip up momentum or tripwire suspense. The acting runs from predictable to wooden to just plain silly. Dead air hangs between [...]
As long as I can remember, I’ve loved horror movies, delighted in stories about monsters getting loose in the dark, scaring complacent squares to death. Scared me, too, but deep down I confess I’ve always been primally tickled when vampires, blobs, giant bugs, werewolves, and aliens broke all the rules. What liberating joy when some [...]
AFI grad Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala can’t help but make art movie aficionados swoon—and Hollywood sit up and take notice. Might there be just a whiff of opportunism, aesthetic and thematic, in this pedal-to-the-metal thriller about the victimization of a young and beautiful woman (Stephanie Sigman) inadvertently swept into the bloody war among Mexican drug [...]
[Originally written for a 2003 film series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art] Pantheon director Howard Hawks (1898–1977) loved to make movies about colorful tough guys coping with actual and existential threats in the middle of some exotic nowhere. As in all the genres he made his own (the gangster film, the Western, [...]
A huge hit at Sundance, Martha Marcy May Marlene has continued to wow festival audiences at Cannes, New York and Toronto. Wide release should extend first-time feature director Sean Durkin’s winning streak: This psychological suspenser cum horror movie fairly pulses with cumulative dread, teasing our nerve endings with scrabbling spider feet of unease until we [...]
Who is Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.? Probably you’ve never heard of this Dutch helmer, and judging by The Thing, his debut film, that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Saddled with “prequeling” John Carpenter’s 1982 classic, and supremely short on originality, van Heijningen Jr. and company simply rework the bare-bones template — shape-shifting alien stalking a [...]
DENDERA In Shohei Imamura’s 1983 masterpiece The Ballad of Narayama, a woman fast approaching 70—the age when the old are sent into the mountains to die—works to ensure her sons’ future well-being. Marrying fatalism and selflessness, the film measures the flow of life and death in a village that lives on the edge of starvation. [...]
Dutch filmmaker Tom Six’s The Human Centipede (First Sequence) accumulated disgust, death threats and lots of video-on-demand dough. It was hard for most people to hear the film’s premise, let alone watch the thing. Framing this almost documentary-style nightmare about a deranged doctor’s experiment to surgically join three human guinea pigs mouth to anus, Six [...]
ALMAYER’S FOLLY After getting up early and driving for three hours, perhaps the first film you watch in the Vancouver International Film Festival should not be Chantal Akerman’s Almayer’s Folly, all two-plus hours of it. Akerman is not the liveliest of directors; her style is lengthy staring, to frame a scene and contemplate it with [...]
Even as Tucker & Dale vs. Evil has fun sending up horror movie conventions and cliches, this low-budget spoof exposes how a mind-set — movie-made, political or religious — can so color the way we see the world, it’s dead easy to demonize people who aren’t us. But fear not: T&D‘s timely message never gets [...]
50/50 is some kind of comedy about cancer, the Big C as unlikely catalyst for growing up. The laughs and dramatic lows don’t always blend as organically as one might wish, and a couple of scenes feel like calculated setups for sentimentality. Still, the prognosis is mostly positive, thanks to the genuine sweetness and pure [...]
Adapted from Michael Lewis’ best-seller, Moneyball makes the down-and-dirty business side of baseball painful fun to follow. Remember those old ’30s musicals that generated sizzle out of backstage machinations, charismatic producers conning investors and starstruck unknowns hitting the big time? That’s how Moneyball plays, not so much in the ballpark but in offices and deep [...]
Memo to Sarah Jessica Parker: For the love of God, stop churning out avatars of Sex and the City‘s Carrie Bradshaw. That shtick is so past its sell date. Even in her heyday, not everyone was crazy about Carrie and her airhead aperçus about pretend-life and love. And now, in I Don’t Know How She [...]