MOVIE REVIEW
Splinter (2008)
Magnet Releasing
Let’s forgo the exposition and come right out with it: Anyone looking for a horror movie fix at the multiplex this Halloween will find every bit of what he or she is looking for in “Splinter.” Or he or she would, were the movie actually opening on more than four screens nationwide. I’ve given up trying to understand how these decisions are made, but surely the folks at Magnet Releasing could have done more with this brutally efficient genre exercise than they have. The film lacks star power and comes from a first-time director, but it’s an ideal antidote to both the glossy PG-13 horror fluff that so often manages to get a wide national release and the tired brutality of the “Saw” franchise.
Continue reading “Spikes at the Gas Pumps” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Matador (2008)
Mauricio Berho/City Lights Pictures
“The Matador,” the new documentary by Stephen Higgins and Nina Gilden Seavey, differs pronouncedly from the better-known recent movie that shared its title – the Pierce Brosnan-Greg Kinnear dark comedy. For example, this is actually a movie about a Spanish matador – the enormously popular David Fandila – and the sport he practices. It’s interested in the uneasy, ongoing adaptation of the regal, old-fashioned sport of bullfighting to the post-modern, politically-correct world and the ways in which Mr. Fandila deals with his celebrity, not in approximating the dysfunctional buddy relationship at the heart of the fictional “Matador.” So, no one should get them confused.
Continue reading “Risky Business” »
Abbot Gensler/Sony Pictures Classics
Not for the fainthearted, the cinema of Charlie Kaufman challenges audiences to consider the multiple cerebral layers that factor into even the most mundane everyday moments, and to process narratives in entirely unexpected fashions. “Synecdoche, New York” – the first movie he’s both written and directed – adheres to that overarching motif, even if it’s otherwise unlike anything anyone’s ever seen.
Continue reading “Confessions of a Delicious Mind” »
MOVIE REVIEW
What Just Happened (2008)
Magnolia Pictures
No one should doubt the veracity of “What Just Happened.” Based on the book by longtime producer and first-time screenwriter Art Linson, the film depicts its Hollywood milieu so realistically it could easily be a documentary. That’s both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness.
Continue reading “The Bad Shepherd” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Max Payne (2008)
Michael Muller/Twentieth Century Fox
My heart quickened during the opening segment of “Max Payne.” Shot in a stylish, video-game-meets-noir style that emphasized deep shadows and soft pockets of artificial light, the film looked cool. With Mark Wahlberg in full, scowling bad-ass mode, a motley collection of demonic villains, some hyperkinetic visuals set to a driving beat on the soundtrack and the odd, mysterious specter of shadowy creatures circling overhead, it seemed reasonable to anticipate a fun time at the movies.
Continue reading “No Gain From This Payne” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Filth and Wisdom (2008)
IFC Films
Directed by a mysterious first-time director named Madonna, “Filth and Wisdom” suffers from the amateurism that so often comes attached to such vanity projects. The story of three London roommates experiencing the highs and lows of their highly sexualized modern lives, the film relies too heavily on techniques that better filmmakers try to minimize: excessive first person narration and music-video montages. It also has the misfortune of starring Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hutz, who with his large mullet, thick mustache and even thicker accent functions as such an Eastern European caricature that he’s impossible to take seriously.
Continue reading “And You Can Dance, for Desperation” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Abbot Gensler/Sony Pictures Classics
In “Synecdoche, New York,” Charlie Kaufman descends fully, firmly down the rabbit hole, lost in a dense world of complications, confusion and severe ambiguity. Whereas the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and first-time director’s better projects successfully imbue his unique, cerebral vision with a straightforward focus on matters of the heart, this one buries its humanity beneath an avalanche of high concepts. The film is original and well cast, but its insistence on being a sort of cinematic Rorschach test – open to a wide variety of interpretations and meanings – causes it to ultimately leave a rather negligible impact.
Continue reading “And All the People Merely Players” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Summer Hours (2008)
Jeannick Gravelines/IFC Films
“Summer Hours” – which stands diametrically opposed to the globe-trotting B-movie tributes that have recently preoccupied writer-director Olivier Assayas – only serves to reaffirm his filmmaking range. It’s an intimate motion picture steeped in nostalgia, one that explores the ways our memories strangely bestow inanimate objects with great personal significance. With its idyllic views of the French countryside, piercing study of sibling relationships and ethereal renderings of the detritus of modern aristocratic life, the film looks and feels like something Eric Rohmer might have made.
Continue reading “Gonna Take a Sentimental Journey” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Waltz With Bashir (2008)
Sony Pictures Classics
In “Waltz With Bashir,” Ari Folman confronts a very specific national crisis, the ramifications of which reverberate today. To his great credit, however, he refuses to turn the film into a diatribe against the politics that permitted the crimes carried out by Christian and Israeli forces at the Sabra and Shantila massacres in Lebanon. “Waltz With Bashir” makes no attempt to connect the incidents to the recent Israeli excursion into Lebanon or, more generally, to the precarious politics of the modern Middle East. Instead, Mr. Folman’s abstractly animated, philosophical motion picture explores one of the great, unspoken casualties of all warfare: its profound lasting psychological toll.
Continue reading “Israeli Filmmaker Draws on Memory” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Body of Lies (2008)
François Duhamel/Warner Bros. Pictures
There’s an interesting movie hidden deep beneath the location-hopping techno-thriller surface of “Body of Lies.” It features a CIA agent working in Jordan and his romance with a local nurse. The ramifications of such a cross-cultural relationship – the suspicions directed toward them by her families and friends and his co-workers – and the ways in which the post-9/11 milieu affects the film could make for interesting, provocative viewing.
Continue reading “Bore on Terrorism” »
