MOVIE REVIEW
Shadow Dancer (2012)
Rob Hardy/Sundance Film Festival 2012
In the growing portfolio of BBC Films — whose output is not to be sniffed at — "Shadow Dancer" sits comfortably in the same section as siblings such as "Page Eight." It's another polished, festival-friendly film that can easily fit into a second life on television without scraping the sides. It features a fine inwardly directed performance from Andrea Riseborough as a troubled I.R.A. informant in 1990s Belfast, a setting that also allows director James Marsh to return to perhaps the most highly charged example available of the environment he loves to film: insular British terraces of secrets and lies, crime and punishment, friends and enemies. The only thing missing is any actual cinematic impact.
Continue reading “Troubles in Mind” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Pusher (2012)
Vertigo Films
After biding his time for 16 years, Nicolas Winding Refn seems to have sprung into action and lent his name to variants of his original "Pusher" film across Europe in an attempt to corner the market. Hence his executive producer credit on "Black's Game," a vibrant and darkly engaging story of Icelandic drug dealers at the turn of the millennium; and almost simultaneously the same credit on the new British remake of "Pusher" itself, from which anything engaging and vibrant seem to have been ruthlessly purged.
Continue reading “Blamespotting” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Dragon (2011)
Radius-TWC
"Dragon" is theoretically a wuxia tale, built on a riotous barrage of martial-arts wire work, kinetic energy and busted heads; but it also happens to be blatantly tooled for Western sensibilities in pacing, editing style and magpie borrowings. It finds room for existential ponderings about the human condition and a dash of mysticism, while also sticking in some explanatory animations of blood clots, bruises and broken bones. No wonder The Weinstein Company's corporate antennae have twitched at the commercial possibilities.
Continue reading “CSI: Yunnan” »
MOVIE REVIEW
7 Days in Havana (2012)
Rezo Films
Portmanteau anthology films — not exactly fashionable, but never quite extinct either — enjoy a shot in the arm every few years from producer Emmanuel Benbihy's Cities of Love franchise, the cycle that has so far produced "Paris, je t'aime" and "New York, I Love You." But Mr. Benbihy's all-star bite-size format feels like a shallower option than the approach tried in "7 Days in Havana," which lets seven diverse directors get their teeth into longer-form stories all penned by the same Cuban screenwriter, Leonardo Padura. The aim is to get under the skin of a city with enough juice in its veins to power any seven stories and another 70 to boot.
Continue reading “Viva la vida” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Killer Joe (2012)
Skip Bolen/
2012 Seattle International Film Festival
William Friedkin's broiling film version of "Killer Joe" is uncompromising, uncompromised and alluringly grubby, catching all the black comedy laid out for the taking in Tracy Letts's play while mining a few new seams of Southern-fried dysfunction to boot. Collaborating again after "Bug" — which stared unswervingly into two unhappy people coming unglued in a closed room — they turn "Killer Joe" into a broader farce: a film prepared to admit that whole families can go so far off the rails that the only fair response is to laugh at the poor tortured bastards and learn.
Continue reading “Malice, Texas” »
Stone Angels
David Cronenberg's skills as an adapter of existing stories (eight of his movies have originated in other works, says a back-of-the-envelope calculation, even without counting "The Fly") are seeming more robust than ever, as he moves away from body horror and dives deeper into the life of the mind. And it's appropriate that, after "A Dangerous Method" dramatized debates about human sexual drives in the form of two erudite talking heads, he should tackle Don DeLillo's "Cosmopolis," in which a deeply disturbed young man wanders off the edge of sanity under his own steam, talking constantly while articulating hardly anything definable at all.
Continue reading “The Value of Nothing” »
Kerry Brown/20th Century Fox
Fan fiction can be fun, but even the good stuff usually crumbles when faced with the simple question "Why bother?" The urge to revisit the "Alien" universe and shine $130 million worth of 3-D clarity into one of its perfectly satisfying corners of ambiguity isn't inherently a bad idea, although anyone hoping for "Prometheus" to show the actual Space Jockey from the first film or how he ended up on LV-426 is going to be disappointed when none of that happens. Instead the film shoots for the moon, declaring from the off that his mysterious species is responsible for life on earth and has been beckoning us to the stars ever since; a plot whose stab at religiosity shares more DNA with "The X-Files" than anything else, right down to the mutating black oil that the Space Jockeys use to create their monsters. "Prometheus" is fan fiction writ very, very large.
Continue reading “Spaceballs” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Edge (2012)
Dogwoof
Surfacing briefly in theaters two years after it was filmed, on the way to what looks like a much more natural berth on a smaller screen, Carol Morley's intimate feature film, "Edge," proves again that the director of "Dreams of a Life" is drawn to looking mortality right in the eye. Its eight seemingly unconnected characters turn out to be very much intertwined — first by parallel threads of loss, regret and unhappiness; and then by a set of coincidences brazenly assembled for the purpose of allowing them all some closure. Marooned in a hotel on a particularly bleak portion of the English south coast in midwinter, they collectively ponder the damage done by an uncaring universe before discovering that their creator isn't as vindictive as all that. Having declared that they can't go on, they go on.
Continue reading “Half in Love With Easeful Death” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Battleship (2012)
ILM/Universal Pictures
The most interesting aspect of Peter Berg's last couple of features was always the involvement of Michael Mann; and Mr. Berg's inclination to take his producer's blue-collar urban-myth-making and process it into something less buttoned-down. But "Battleship" swings in other directions, borrowing instead from the Tony Scott book of naval ballistics and immediately summoning up instead the spirit of Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer circa 1986. It also has the gall, the nerve, the stainless-steel balls required to include a version of the Hasbro pastime's actual gameplay into its plot as a military strategy — for which, frankly, hats off.
Continue reading “Yes, You Can Put Your Mind at Ease” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Bel Ami (2012)
Studiocanal
Social climbing never goes out of fashion; and dubious press practices, Western countries bogged down in desert conflicts and unhappy war veterans are all about as current as it gets. So despite the outward signs of a musty costume drama, "Bel Ami" is never stale. In fact, it takes pains to stay sprightly throughout the tale of Georges Duroy (Robert Pattinson), skilled lothario and serial seducer — a man able to keep three mistresses warm at once and still find the energy to be rude to the servants. You could almost call it jaunty, as long as you ignore the lingering urge to kick the big Gallic jerk in the knee.
Continue reading “Love in the Afternoon, Every Afternoon” »