A refreshingly high-concept low-budget outing, the Duplass Brothers' "Baghead" is an immensely likeable and surprisingly well-executed genre hybrid. The difficulty one finds in trying to categorize it is part of its charm, and this is not just whether one sees it as horror, comedy, or relationship r...
Read More »In many ways, the debut feature from Bangkok-born, American-educated Aditya Assarat, "Wonderful Town," has all the hallmarks of a workshopped Sundance indie: an eminently tasteful romance between two ingratiatingly sweet people burgeoning against a backdrop of recent tragedy, buoyed by delicate guit...
Read More »Like Lee Chang-dong's 2007 "Secret Sunshine," Charles Oliver's debut feature "Take" deals with the awkward moral quandaries of infanticide and the subsequent, touchy relations between a killer and his victim's mother. That Lee's film remains unreleased in this country is no doubt due in part to the ...
Read More »The catchwords for "Before I Forget" would seem to be direct, intimate, unsparing; yet, conversely, it also feels cavernous and, in its seeming brutal frankness, slippery and elusive. Either drenched in unyielding shadow or flooded with harsh light, "Before I Forget" follows the sixty-something Pier...
Read More »In its detailing of a couple's financial freefall after the loss of a job, Silvio Soldini's "Days and Clouds" -- recently featured in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual roundup of new Italian cinema -- couldn't ask for a more fittingly precipitous point in time for its American theatrical r...
Read More »What is it about Los Angeles that makes it prone to multicharacter, excess-minded ensembles and devoted tributes to itself disguised as critiques? Well, as we learned from Paul Haggis's ethnography-as-racial-burlesque "Crash," everyone in that city just sort of, well, crashes into each other--presum...
Read More »Hunter S. Thompson's prose was nervy and pugnacious, his judgments bullying and hyperbolic, his life as volatile as any in postwar American letters. "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" couldn't be any more different in mien and spirit. A couple of passages aside, it is almost perver...
Read More »One could surmise the mediocrity of "Diminished Capacity" from reading the synopsis alone: Cooper (Matthew Broderick), a small-town-boy-made-good in the big city but lately suffering from the lasting effects of a serious concussion, heads back home to visit his fading Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda). As ...
Read More »Guillaume Canet's "Tell No One" begins with a certain nonchalance that one wouldn't ordinarily expect from a suspense thriller, least of all one that adapts Harlan Coben's multi-twist mystery plotting with the brio of a distinctly "Bourne"-again action film. In its first minutes, the film draws us i...
Read More »The first time Asia Argento appears in Catherine Breillat's "The Last Mistress," she fills the frame, reclining on a couch with devilish confidence as her character, Vellini, discusses the upcoming marriage of Ryno (Fu'ad Ait Aattou), her lover of ten years, to another woman. It's an appropriate ent...
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My weekly SNL write-up for @indiewire is here: http://t.co/fzZYaHN3XJ Ben Affleck did fine, but the season finale was unfortunately mediocre
Posted 27 minutes ago
Trailer round-up for @indiewire--Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Spivet" looks as curious and peculiar as "Amelie" http://t.co/Ie2fBkUpP3
Posted 38 minutes ago
@indiewire’s analysis of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight programming highlights Freak Me Out’s WE ARE WHAT WE ARE: http://t.co/Es2GPV9FJ6
Posted 44 minutes ago
Watch: Trailer For Alejandro Jodorowskys First Film In 23 Years, 'The Dance Of Reality' | The Playlist http://t.co/u2ocHlsE6R via @indiewire
Posted 45 minutes ago