MOVIE REVIEW
Get Low (2010)
Sam Emerson/Sony Pictures Classics
Robert Duvall dominates "Get Low" from the off, easing into the part of crusty codger Felix Bush like an old shoe and spiriting the film away from under the noses of several other very fine actors. Looking so weathered that even his whiskers seem exhausted, Mr. Duvall builds Felix from a symphony of emphysemic wheezes, creaking joints, muttered wisdom and withering scorn. Chances are he got paid for it, but that might not have been essential.
Continue reading “Uncouth at a Funeral” »
Helena Smith/
Edinburgh International Film Festival
In an approach sure to tickle the locals, Sylvain Chomet's "The Illusionist" views the misty slopes of the Scottish highlands and the spooky battlements of Edinburgh though the eyes of a visiting Frenchman and finds them all unutterably magical. Born through a lucky intersection of an uncompleted Jacques Tati script and Mr. Chomet's visit to the Scottish capital with "The Triplets of Belleville" (released as "Belleville Rendez-Vous" in Britain) in 2003, his new animation sings with nostalgia, charm and the painful passage of time.
Continue reading “French Animator Conjures Illusions of Auld Reekie” »
Daryl Pittman/S&Z Productions
The Edinburgh International Film Festival 2009 ended with the news that ticket sales were up on the previous year, proving that the move from August to June was helping the festival carve out a new mid-year identity as the organizers intended. The move has also clearly raised the event's appeal to mainstream distributors arranging their summer schedules, with many of the big-ticket items using Edinburgh as a springboard for a wide release shortly after the festival closes. Whether this is putting the squeeze on the number of smaller and quirkier films here will be a point worth watching.
Continue reading “Edinburgh ’09: Antichrist and Antipasto Giallo at Auld Reekie” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Spread (2009)
2009 Sundance Film Festival
A timely satire of Los Angeles's young and shameless could and should have worked, but "Spread" is not that film. This one is a heavy-handed sex comedy that starts off weak and ends up as an outright bad idea. It features a parade of beautiful people being horrible to each other half-dressed and then going to bed to be more horrible to each other in the nude, but despite this it's hard to work up much enthusiasm. The film's real message seems to be that producer and star Ashton Kutcher would like to be Warren Beatty, and if you can handle that concept then kudos to you.
Continue reading “Boogie Nights on Sunset Boulevard” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Missing Person (2009)
Strand Releasing
The contradictions in Noah Buschel's modern-dress noir, "The Missing Person," are all honed to a fine edge. Its booze-sodden, hard-boiled private dick can't comprehend the concept of a camera phone but can still discuss the finer points of Stravinsky with the Feds. The grizzled cabbie in the California desert turns out to be a New Yorker and a big admirer of Frank Serpico. And what looks like a general noirish rigmarole of dames, trains and automobiles actually hinges not just on the human catastrophe of New York's blackest day, but on the redemptive power of American art. It's a noir for the ages, and it's a treat.
Continue reading “Vanishing Within a Trace” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Fish Tank (2009)
Festival de Cannes
The inconvenient truth about films which prize naturalism above all else is that they can easily meet theatricality coming back the other way. There are elements in Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank" that set it above any previous British kitchen-sink drama, most especially a depiction of young female sexuality handled more deftly than a male director would manage, whatever his documentary credentials. But set against that, the film clanks to a halt at regular intervals to indulge stereotypes so familiar that you wonder what exactly Ms. Arnold was after.
Continue reading “Taking the Jailbait” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Hurt Locker (2008)
Summit Entertainment
"The Hurt Locker" lays its cards on the table with the opening words: "War is a drug." Anyone at odds with that thought will have a tough time at Kathryn Bigelow's film, which gives the notion a good chewing over. Action movies can be a drug too, and luckily for addicts of the hard stuff, Ms. Bigelow finds in the dust of Baghdad a further evolution of her interest in blue-collar obsessives and the macho mindset, and the results are pretty combustible.
Continue reading “Caught Between Iraq and a Hard Place” »