A new almost-musical from Ireland, "Once" neatly transcends even the hoariest of cliches about the sublime communicative powers of pop music. This is a treat and a surprise, as films this slight and unassuming often seem more apt to curl up into themselves than approach any sort of expansiveness. A...
Read More »Even as Tsai Ming-liang nearly hypnotizes the viewer with his elegantly composed static images and methodical pacing, rarely does a filmmaker encouraged such active engagement with stillness. The Taiwanese director might be the visual narrative stylist par excellence working in cinema today; an enti...
Read More »There's no doubt that filmmaker Julia Loktev makes quite an impression with her debut feature "Day Night Day Night," which shows off her expertise at oblique storytelling and subjective suspense. Yet the bigger questions of why "Day Night Day Night" exists, and what tensions it's capitalizing on can...
Read More »Chock-a-block with recognizable directors and thespians, "Paris, je t'aime" is a series of vignettes commissioned by producers Emmanuel Benbihy and Claudie Ossard. Each of its 18 segments is ostensibly connected through the concept of L'amour in the City of Lights (introduced, dazzling, under millen...
Read More »Considering "L'Iceberg," a cute-as-a-button-and-about-as-sharp-as-same feature debut comedy from Belgium by writing/directing/acting team Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and Bruno Romney, it seems the deadpan ethos of Wes Anderson has found a home in mainland Europe. In a way, this style has come full...
Read More »Waiting for "Civic Duty" to start, I browsed its synopsis: an everyday guy, recently unemployed, spends all day taking in alarmist TV news and, saturated with images of swarthy bad guys, decides to undertake a paranoiac surveillance operation on his new Middle Eastern neighbor. As the lights went do...
Read More »Hollywood cranked out a plethora of movies about World War II and the Korean War as they were being fought. But it took years after Vietnam and the Gulf War for the U.S. to make fiction features about them. Today, American documentarians are pretty much the only filmmakers addressing the wars in Ira...
Read More »For moviegoers, the thought of "losing" Julie Christie might simply be too much to bear. That's why Sarah Polley's got a devastating hook in her crystalline feature debut "Away from Her": as Christie's Alzheimer's-afflicted Fiona slowly slips away from her husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent), she's also ...
Read More »1. Whither American indie films?2. Do they evolve?3. Or wither?
Read More »"Poison Friends" revives a rare pleasure of moviegoing: articulacy. Ten years ago Phillip Lopate diagnosed a "Dumbing Down of American Movies," and the disproportionate praise given to reactionary "realism" in recent indies suggests that, as expectations shrivel, things have gotten stupider across t...
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