IFC Films
My favorite film of the year is on this list. My second and third favorites were too experimental to attract any wide distribution, but that's life. Mainstream distributors prefer event movies, and event movies are more to do with drug delivery and a repeat of whatever pleasant sensations seemed to work last time rather than anything more sophisticated, but that's life as well. The porn industry has done alright for itself with that business model for centuries, and with about as much need for critics, too.
Continue reading “Dream Country” »
Karen Ballard/Lionsgate
The big story in film in Britain in 2010 was the closure by the coalition government of the UK Film Council, the centralized funding body for British films with the caveat that the productions had to be aimed at the people in the region where it was filmed. The resulting movies tended to appeal to no one at all, although there were several glorious exceptions, this year's "Tamara Drewe" among them. The responsibilities are instead being shifted to the British Film Institute, which runs the BFI London Film Festival and an Imax, manages the BFI National Archive, publishes books on cinema and releases DVDs of various classic or neglected films. These responsibilities are so new and vague, the BFI hasn't yet bothered to update its website. And since the government has already developed a history of backtracking on its cultural cuts (eg. the furor over Bookstart, a charity providing free books to underprivileged kids), it's still uncertain what is going to happen.
Continue reading “C.G.I. and Rental Stores, They Were Expendable” »
MOVIE REVIEW
True Grit (2010)
Lorey Sebastian/Paramount Pictures
In “True Grit,” the Coen brothers play it straight. The masters of caustic pastiche and razor-sharp observational cinema return to the western, but not with the tension of “Blood Simple” or the existential weirdness of “No Country for Old Men.” Instead, their adaptation of the 1968 Charles Portis novel (and not, it must be stressed, the 1969 Academy Award-winning John Wayne vehicle) is largely a return to the genre’s classical form.
Continue reading “A Woman, a Gun and Some Noodling Around” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)
Oscilloscope Laboratories
Every so often a film comes along that so completely engrosses, bewilders and charms that it is guaranteed cult classic status; and Jelmari Helander's fiendish Finnish fable about the true nature of Santa is one such gem.
Continue reading “You Better Watch Out; Santa Claus Is Contemning the Town” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Hemingway’s Garden of Eden (2010)
Susan Allnutt/Roadside Attractions
A soft-core, Jazz Age skin flick masquerading as high art, “Garden of Eden” nonetheless could well be a faithful adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published novel. Maybe the icon really did write characters as obtuse and superficial as these, and maybe the man who wrote “The Old Man and the Sea,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” actually produced a narrative so fully comprised of superficial psychobabble.
Controversies over the editing of the work and the usual luxuries of page-to-screen adapters make it impossible to know exactly what Papa intended. Yet, no matter the pedigree, the movie director John Irvin has given us is a cornball, slide-show assemblage of luxurious images, beautiful women in various states of undress and some childhood-in-African flashbacks ripped from the pages of the worst boilerplate fiction.
Continue reading “For Whom the Belle Tolls” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Tourist (2010)
Peter Mountain/Columbia Pictures
These are tough times for froth. When half of mainstream cinema is pastiche already and most of the rest wants its childhood back, what does deliberate frivolity even look like? "The Tourist" has a go at finding out, no thought in its pretty head beyond the visual pleasure of packing two pocket-rockets of screen presence off to Europe and having them stand in front of exotic buildings. Purged of every molecule of guile, it leaves the audience in a mild state of free fall, waiting for Hollywood snark that never arrives.
Continue reading “Venice Plays Itself” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Black Swan (2010)
Niko Tavernise/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” arrives in theaters amid a torrent of hype, a swirl of anticipation spurred by the glamorous sex appeal of high-end ballet, sapphic copulation and Grand Guignol melodrama. But what really makes the picture tick is its insight into the performer’s soul, the striving for perfection, the quest for complete immersion in a part that spurs the proverbial blurred line between the real and the imagined.
Continue reading “Pirouetting Out of Control” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Fighter (2010)
JoJo Whilden/Paramount Pictures
“The Fighter” isn’t this year’s “The Wrestler.” Think of it rather as the American riff on the “Animal Kingdom” milieu. Hardly anyone could possibly find this true story of Lowell, Mass., boxer Micky Ward (here played by Mark Wahlberg) inspirational because it so seeps with the same disdain for the underclass found in that Australian coming-of-age crime saga.
Continue reading “Low Blow the Underclass to Kingdom Come” »
MOVIE REVIEW
TRON: Legacy (2010)
Disney Enterprises
"TRON: Legacy," a movie that has been in the works since the mid-'90s, is finally here. It wears its reported budget of more than $200 million very much on its sleeve, with amazing costumes, lighting and C.G.I. work combining to create a believable — and pleasingly three-dimensional — computer-focused world. But all the money in its budget was unable to buy the filmmakers a single original idea. On reflection, that's perhaps what "TRON: Legacy" is meant to be: the first major studio mash-up movie.
Continue reading “A Digitized Shadow of Science Fiction” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1 (2010)
Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros. Pictures
The beginning of the story’s end comes to life in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1,” the seventh and penultimate entry in the cinematic juggernaut. Less a conventional “H. P.” film than a road movie rocked by physical and hormonal turmoil, David Yates’s third crack at the franchise goes to a dark, interesting place, even if the whole enterprise feels rather played-out, so last decade.
Continue reading “The Fellowship of the Horcrux” »