MOVIE REVIEW
Her (2013)
Warner Brothers Pictures
These days, neither Spike Jonze nor Charlie Kaufman seems to have much fun working apart from the other. At first glance, the premise of Mr. Jonze’s “Her” suggests a return to zany form following “Where the Wild Things Are”: The new film concerns Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com writer who is in the midst of a divorce and developing romantic feelings toward Siri version 20.0, here known as Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). While parts of it are hilarious just as one would expect, the rest of the film takes on a surprisingly somber tone.
Continue reading “Your Wish Is Its Command” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Stray Dogs (2013)
William Laxton/
Homegreen Films and Jba Production
After following the lead of his contemporaries and working abroad, director Tsai Ming-liang (no relation) returns to a Taiwan as damp and dilapidated as ever with his latest, “Stray Dogs.” Although the film does feature stray dogs of both literal and figurative varieties, its English title doesn’t even begin to cover this story about a father with two children in tow. In fact, the original Mandarin title, “Jiao you” — which means “field trip” in English — is a much more apt description of the overall experience.
Continue reading “A Hole Is Not a Home” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Alison Rosa/Studiocanal
Revisiting the struggling-artist archetype 22 years after “Barton Fink,” Joel and Ethan Coen this time place him squarely in the 1960s East Village folk scene instead of 1940s Hollywood. For all but two scenes (in fact, it’s an early scene that recurs toward the end), “Inside Llewyn Davis” has this time eschewed the noir for which the writing-directing brothers are best known and assumes the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”-type odyssey.
Continue reading “Burn After Listening” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Wind Rises (2013)
© 2013 二馬力・GNDHDDTK
Hayao Miyazaki’s final film before retirement (heard that one before with “Ponyo” — glad it wasn’t true then, hope it isn’t true now), “The Wind Rises” is perhaps the legendary animator’s most adult film ever. Since maturity and wisdom are a given in his anime even when aimed for children, we say adult because the new film is based on history and biographies for a change. “The Wind Rises” is a fictionalized account of the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed many of Japan’s World War II fighters. The result is part Studio Ghibli fantasy and part Yasujiro Ozu melodrama about life in Imperial Japan leading up to the Second World War.
Continue reading “Final Flight of Fancy” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Le Week-end (2013)
Nicola Dove/Music Box Films
Director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi’s fourth collaboration, “Le Week-end” continues their exploration of the desires of the olds following “The Mother” and “Venus.” Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan star respectively as Nick and Meg Burrows, who are visiting Paris for the first time since their honeymoon three decades earlier. They exude a certain upper-middle-class façade of intellect and affluence that is instantly recognizable: You’ve seen these archetypes out and about on the Upper West Side, strutting from cabs outside the Lincoln Center on their way to attend important cultural events. The film’s American premiere at the New York Film Festival comes as a shocker to no one.
Continue reading “Midlife in Paris” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Beyond the Hills (2013)
Sundance Selects
Cristian Mungiu’s third full-length film divided opinion when it premiered at Cannes in May, where it won some enthusiastic admirers it but failed to achieve the consensus of critical appreciation that coalesced around “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” a few years earlier.
It’s not hard to see why, because it doesn’t quite satisfy the distinct requirements for Cannes’s respective core crowds. Although it’s long and foreboding, it doesn’t quite display enough fanatical austerity or philosophical rigor to appeal to hard-core slow cinema adherents. But neither is it the relatively accessible and salable arthouse product that might appeal to buyers and distributors, unlike Mr. Mungiu’s previous film. Lying somewhere between these two dominant schools of art-cinema appreciation, the film may fall between the cracks when it comes to 2012 retrospective lists, but there’s still much to admire about Mr. Mungiu’s filmmaking.
Continue reading “Praying the Gay Away” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Ginger & Rosa (2012)
Nicola Dove/56th BFI London Film Festival
Sally Potter has always been famous for making movies considered unmakable. “Ginger & Rosa” is her determined attempt to enter the mainstream by telling a straightforward story in a straightforward — albeit minimalist — way. Her instincts as a filmmaker for style, sound and faces are as sharp as ever, but she seems to have forgotten that sometimes the most direct way of making a point is by going in a roundabout way.
Continue reading “A World on the Brink, a Friendship Tested” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Amour (2012)
Sony Pictures Classics
It’s long been argued by social commentators that advanced Western societies have yet to come to terms with the moral and philosophical implications of our rapidly aging populations and the subsequent issues around longevity, euthanasia and death. Symptomatic of this avoidance is our cultural neglect of these issues, with very few films and artworks examining themes of infirmity, dementia and the often ignoble circumstances in which many live out their final days. While no subject is too taboo for a cinematic culture that’s willing to parade all manner of unimaginable graphic imagery in front of us, it seems some matters are just too damn depressing to contemplate.
Luckily a filmmaker as intrepid as Michael Haneke is at hand. His new film — about an elderly couple’s valiant attempt to retain their dignity at all costs in the face of inevitable physical deterioration — feels like as timely and necessary film for our wider cultural discourse. Hopefully it will have enough impact to make its own meaningful contribution to the debate.
Continue reading “In Sickness and in Health” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)
Memento Films
In the beginning, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” seems to signal a major departure for Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan. With its lush, warm colors and timeless fable-like quality, the film is at first glance nothing like Mr. Ceylan’s meditations on urban alienation. In a long shot, golden headlight beams sweep through the darkness and ignite the Anatolian steppe like comets in the night sky. A caravan of cars wriggles across the hilly countryside amid stops that are virtually indistinguishable from each other as if in an Abbas Kiarostami movie, carrying cops, a prosecutor, a doctor, a few gendarmes, some gravediggers and a pair of murder suspects searching in vain for a corpse. They argue, wax poetic and bond in the course of the twilight-zone journey. But once they unearth the body, it finally becomes apparent that Mr. Ceylan is treading familiar territory after all.
Continue reading “The Wind Will Tarry Us” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Artist (2011)
The Weinstein Company
“The Artist” is a movie made out of love. There is no other way to describe it. It is a love letter to cinema, to style and to the art of making movies; and anyone who loves movies needs to see it — now.
It is about the relationship between George Valentin (Jean Dujardin of the “OSS 117” movies) and young Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, who was the maid in “A Knight’s Tale”). George is the biggest movie star in 1927 Hollywood; and he meets Peppy when she accidentally drops her handbag at a red-carpet event. Photographs of them together make the front page, to the annoyance of studio head Zimmer (John Goodman, who you can tell enjoyed himself). But the fuss gets Peppy — and her legs — work as an extra; and her career takes off from there. But as sound comes into movies, George doesn’t realize his star status might change along with the movies.
Continue reading “Silence Is Golden” »