Like the 2004 film Dead Man’s Shoes in which Considine gave what is arguably his best performance as an actor, Tyrannosaur is a work of unnerving intensity and brutal realism, yet, in spite of its intermittent violent acts, a surprisingly quiet film that has moments of warmth and humor....
Read the Review
(4/19)
The Hunger Games is entertaining, pretty exciting, and engaging -- it, like Twilight, is a star-crossed romance. Jennifer Lawrence, of Winter's Bone, has stepped up to become a star for millions in the lead role. But the story, about a violent gladiatorial contest to-the-death among two dozen 12-18-year-old youths, has been defanged.....
Read the Review
(4/10)
If the Duplass Brothers’ slacker comedy, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, is any indication, the corporate culture is now looking to trivialize and exploit the bourgeoning interest in spirituality. While the film promotes sound ideas of spiritual connection and a purposeful universe, it turns them into a meaningless jumble of clichés, using them only as a device to market a contrived and artificial commercial product....
Read the Review
(3/25)
The Hunger Games is the huge new super blockbuster debuted this weekend, destined, they say, to push Twilight out of the top spot as monarch of the box office and king of the hearts of teenage girls, and boys, and everybody. At this moment it seems more than ever sweet to look instead at Terrence Davies' beautiful new swoon of a sad romance, The Deep Blue Sea....
Read the Review
(3/25)
The poet Rilke said, “There is only one journey. Going inside yourself. Here something blooms; from out of a silent crevice an unknowing weed emerges singing into existence.” The unknowing weed takes its time to sing but sing it does in director Tran Anh Hung’s film Norwegian Wood, his first since Vertical Ray of the Sun in 2000...
Read the Review
(3/25)
If last year's "Best of..." lists were all over the place, this year's were focused on a small handful of films that seemed to hold near universal appeal. That's not to say there wasn't plenty of quality films to choose from--nearly sixty movies made their way onto our reviewers' lists of last year's favorites (with even more showing up as honorable mentions). But one film showed up on every single list submitted, with another thirteen showing up on multiple lists....
Read the Lists Here
(2/18)
Albert Nobbs is a strange movie, lively around the edges but dead at the core. Its central character, the woman posing as a man at a Dublin hotel who calls herself Albert, is played by Glenn Close, and Close has gotten a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance. But this Albert Nobbs is not believable as a woman or as a man and not in any way an interesting character ....
Read the Review
(2/1)
Nominated for Best Foreign Language film at the 2012 Oscars, Monsieur Lazhar is an adaptation of Évelyne de la Chenelière’s stage play, and is produced by Luc Déry and Kim McCraw, the same team that gave us the Oscar-nominated Incendies. According to the jury at the Toronto Film Festival, it is “a film that explores loss, exile, and the truths we tell our children.”....
Read the Review
(2/1)
Asgar Leth's Man on a Ledge is certainly no award candidate. It's not as absorbing and flavorful as Contraband or as intense and thought-provoking as The Grey. But it's not as pointless and incomprehensible as Hayire either. For all its faults, it contains many of the elements of a successful actioner.. ....
Read the Review
(2/1)
In other hands, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close might have been an emotionally resonant experience of devastating loss and the quest for completion. In spite of some excellent performances, however, Daldry never comes to grips with the potential of the material, instead offering a contrived, manipulative, and shallow exercise that does little more than grate on the nerves......
Read the Review
Flicks
Chris Dashiell
THE PURCHASE PRICE (William Wyler, 1932).
The implausible tale of a nightclub singer (Barbara Stanwyck) who becomes a mail-order bride in order to evade her gangster boyfriend, and ends up falling for her hayseed North Dakota husband (George Brent). Other than its Warner pre-Code flavor, it has little to recommend it except Stanwyck's reliable energy and charisma.
SIR ARNE'S TREASURE (Mauritz Stiller, 1919).
A young woman unwittingly falls in love with the man who murdered her family, in this stark drama set in 16th century Sweden. Stiller's technique is incredibly advanced and exemplary in every way, and this is one of the haunting masterpieces of silent cinema.
PETULIA (Richard Lester, 1968).
A real oddity: San Francisco's summer of love as refracted through two confused middle class people. Julie Christie and George C. Scott couldn't be more opposite types, but this works in the film's favor. Not completely satisfying, but the unexpected tonal subtlety has its rewards.
JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (Chantal Akerman, 1975).
This famous, and notorious, challenge to narrative conventions concerns a single mother (Delphine Seyrig) doing her household chores over a three day period while turning the occasional trick. Over a three hour and twenty minute running time, Akerman depicts the monotonous tension of female domestic routine. A difficult and enormously influential film.
ACE IN THE HOLE (Billy Wilder, 1951).
Kirk Douglas plays a reporter who takes the story of a man trapped in a cave in New Mexico, and turns it into a national frenzy. The view of humanity is acerbic even by Wilder standards, and the film bombed. Its view of the American media and a public hungry for trivial excitement seems amazingly prescient today.
Three from Schumann
The Artist
French director Michel Hazanavicius’ surprise hit The Artist is a charming recreation of the silent film era of the late 1920s that focuses on how the advent of talking pictures spelled the end of careers for those silent film stars who could not or would not make the transition.....
Read the Review
Margin Call
Coinciding with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations around the world, first-time director J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call looks at the motives and morality of those in positions of power in a fictional 107-year-old financial institution and how they react in a career-threatening crisis....
Read the Review
Margaret
If Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, his first film since You Can Count on Me, establishes anything it is that unless we can acknowledge responsibility and forgive ourselves for any real or perceived wrongdoing, we are caught in an endless cycle of denial and recrimination, potentially causing great damage to ourselves and others by internalizing our guilt.....
Read the Review
(12/22)
Three by Knipp
Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011) - Shame is a film about a handsome but very cold New York corporate employee who is a raging sex addict. It stars Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) and Cary Mulligan (Drive and An Education).
....
Read the Review
Outrage (Takeshi Kitano, 2010)
Takeshi Kitano's Outrage (Autoreiji) is a Japanese gangster movie of extreme brutality presented in such pure and unadulterated form it attains a kind of zen austerity, and at moments a trace of self-satire. ...
Read the Review
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011)
Barely is the 2009 original language version of Stieg Larsson's pulp procedural out of US art houses than here comes a bigger budget English language film distributed in the mainstream cineplexes. David Fincher's dragon tattoo girl isn't enough better than the not-so-good Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo film (directed by the not-so-known Niels Arden Oplev) to get excited about.....
Read the Review
(12/22)
VIFF 2011 (Part Two)
Howard Schumann
Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli, 2011)
Winner of the Camera d’Or for the best first feature in Cannes, Pablo Giorgelli’s Las Acacias is a work of deceptive simplicity, a film that captures the essence of human longing mostly through facial expressions, glances, and gestures....
Read the Review
This is Not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi, 2010)
Hidden inside a birthday cake and smuggled out of the country, the 75-minute “effort”, This is Not a Film, tells us all we need to know about the cruelty of the Iranian dictatorship and the courage of film director Jafar Panahi...
Read the Review
Play (Ruben Ostlund, 2011)
Based on an actual racial incident in Gothenburg, Sweden, Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Play is a compelling study of how our lives are often run by stereotypes, racial or otherwise, and how the line between victims and victimizers can be a thin one....
Read the Review
(11/29)
Most critics have merely differed as to whether the three preceding Twilight pictures were watchable or just plain lousy; distinguishing differences in their irrelevant quality levels is hairsplitting out of medieval scholasticism. The girls flock to the cinemas and the money rolls in... (11/29)
Read the Review
Alexander Payne, returning to the big screen for the first time since Sideways seven years ago, has made a film even more intensely rooted in place than anything he's done before. And it's a film full of geniality and wisdom; funny, unpredictable, and sui generis -- while seeming on the surface remarkably like mainstream entertainment.. ... (11/8)
Read the Review
In first time director Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), a young woman in her early twenties joins a commune in a wooded area in upstate New York and endures psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of charismatic leader Patrick (John Hawkes) ... (11/8)
Read the Review
Footnote is not an action movie but a tragicomedy -- about scholarly integrity; or is it futility? -- with enormous conflict, both repressed and open. It too, like Beaufort, centers compellingly on figures who wander a kind of half-abandoned but still dangerous battleground. It's also a deeply fascinating character study, and would warrant unhesitating recommendation were it not for a weak ending. ... (10/17)
Read the Review
VIFF 2011 (Part One)
Howard Schumann
Hors Satan (Bruno Dumont, 2011)
Controversial French director Bruno Dumont’s latest film, Hors Satan, is a puzzling, excruciatingly slow meditation on the nature of good and evil and whether Christ and Satan could be two sides of the same coin....
Read the Review
Tatsumi (Erik Khoo, 2011)
Directed by Eric Khoo, Tatsumi explores the life and work of the celebrated manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi who created the gekiga style of alternative comic books for adults...
Read the Review
Like Crazy (Drake Doremus, 2011)
Drake Doremus’ Like Crazy, the story of a young couple having to engage in a long-distance relationship as a result of the violation of immigration requirements, is a sincere film from the director’s own experience, but one that ultimately comes up empty...
Read the Review
(10/17)
