Movie Reviews

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REVIEW | Sweet Sounds: John Carney's "Once"

by Indiewire on May 11, 2007

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...

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REVIEW | Unspoken Truth: Tsai Ming-liang's "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone"

by Michael Koresky on May 8, 2007

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...

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REVIEW | Remote Control: Julia Loktev's "Day Night Day Night"

by Michael Koresky on May 7, 2007

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...

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REVIEW | Picking Up the Pieces: "Paris, je t'aime"

by Nick Pinkerton on May 4, 2007

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...

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REVIEW | Frozen Assets: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and Bruno Romney's "L'Iceberg"

by Michael Rowin on May 3, 2007

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...

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REVIEW | Terror Bull: Jeff Renfroe's "Civic Duty"

by Nick Pinkerton on May 2, 2007

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...

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TRIBECA '07 | Critics Notebook 4: Reel Politic

by Howard Feinstein on May 2, 2007

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...

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REVIEW | In Loving Memory: Sarah Polley's "Away from Her"

by Michael Koresky on May 2, 2007

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 ...

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TRIBECA '07 | Critics Notebook 3: The Evolution and Whither American Indies

by Howard Feinstein on April 30, 2007

1. Whither American indie films?2. Do they evolve?3. Or wither?

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REVIEW | Bad Education: Emmanuel Bordieu's "Poison Friends"

by Nick Pinkerton on April 26, 2007

"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...