Amanda Matlovich/Headless Films Inc.
MOVIE REVIEW
Seven Veils (2023)
If you’ve even seen a man on social media ask the woman who wrote the article if she’s ever read it, then you know exactly how “Seven Veils” feels. There’s a naivety here about how men in positions of power have exploited the women around them, both in the hallowed halls of opera and in the Bible, that feels somewhat unwarranted from a writer-director as attuned to sexualized bad behavior as Atom Egoyan. He’s directed more than one opera production of “Salome” himself, so this project is a meta attempt to analyze the text while also performing the text. And there’s nothing wrong with that, especially at the Berlinale. But his attempts to address how the world is no longer willing to tolerate sexualized violence needed less righteous indignation and more maturity.
Continue reading “Northern Exposure” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Rust and Bone (2012)
Roger Arpajou/Sony Pictures Classics
Jacques Audiard knows how to inhabit the body. In his films he manages to bring us inside the bodies of his characters so that we can also feel what they are feeling. But not really their emotions — Mr. Audiard has less time for emotions than almost any other filmmaker currently working. What he is somehow able to convey is the actual physical sensation of swimming in the ocean, dancing in a nightclub or hitting someone in the head.
Continue reading “Twist of Fates” »
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
On the Road (2012)
Gregory Smith/IFC Films
The urge to make movies out of things never intended to be movies — to put every cultural artifact with any potency through the moving-picture mincing machine and see whether what comes out of the other end, can reach the parts the original never managed to in some meaningful (or profitable) way — is a thoroughly mixed blessing. "On The Road," Jack Kerouac's freewheeling jazz symphony of youthful dislocation and post-war America reformation, lends itself to cinematic presentation not at all, so Walter Salles and writer Jose Rivera make some eminently reasonable compromises trying to squeeze the author's squirming text into a tidy box and sit on the lid. But one of them was to not actually use the roads that Kerouac's characters worshiped, instead forced by logistics to film in Canada and South America, and so depriving the characters and the rest of us of the chance to chase the same horizons that Kerouac had in mind. Of all the gifts that a film version could have brought to this particular story, forgoing that one leaves a dent in the grand plan: The America in this American myth has gone missing.
Continue reading “Lost Horizon” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Anna Karenina (2012)
Laurie Sparham/Focus Features
Joe Wright and Tom Stoppard's bracing adaptation of "Anna Karenina" throws its roots out in all directions. Set 90 percent of the time in an impossible theatrical limbo of sets and stagecraft – in which reality warps every time anyone opens a door – and the other 10 percent in a calm pastoral outdoors where nature seems to have paused for breath, the film gingers up its costume drama with luscious practical effects and a Brechtian grit. Threads from relatively unusual suspects such as Richard Attenborough's "Oh! What a Lovely War" mix with the modern self-conscious fizz of Baz Luhrmann and the model train work of Francis Ford Coppola's "Dracula." It's a big risk, and it pays off more often than not.
Continue reading “Love Crimes” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Dredd 3D (2012)
Joe Alblas/Lionsgate
Judge Dredd, Britain's lawman for all seasons — his passport stamped as Robocop's cousin for American purposes while actually being as site-specific as the early works of Johnny Rotten — rides again. And does so in a film stripped down to the bone, all froth removed jointly by author and budget until there's nothing left but sinew and gristle, globs of which then splash across the screen. Arriving just as the doors shut on Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" odyssey and its many tons of polished microengineering, "Dredd 3D" turns the dial back to a point nearer John Carpenter and Richard Stanley, to films set 20 minutes into the future, where the neon doesn't work and the daylight doesn't penetrate, and around the corner someone with an overdraft waits to separate you from your head.
Continue reading “Down by Law” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Raid: Redemption (2012)
Akhirwan Nurhaidir/
Sony Pictures Classics
Artfully sadistic and elegantly hypnotic, Gareth Evans’s “The Raid: Redemption” is a master class in brutally stylistic and simplistic storytelling. Ostensibly a traditional cops-vs.-bad-guys frenetic beat-’em-up, Mr. Evans executed his tale with such flair and guile that this is far superior fare to comparable genre pictures. Mr. Evans’s appreciation of and fascination with the Indonesian martial art pencak silat ensures that every punch and kick hits the mark, subjecting his audience to a relentless assault on the senses.
Continue reading “Emergency Exit Through a Fiery Escape” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Girl Model (2012)
Dogwoof
The dichotomous nature of the modeling industry is brutally exposed by documentarian duo David Redmon and Ashley Sabin in this stark exposé of the realities of the business. It’s a bleak and damning indictment of a trade that shatters any glamorous or aspirational illusions that may have still surrounded it, instead revealing it to be as sordid as many might have suspected.
Continue reading “Working for the Skin-Deep Trade” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Norwegian Wood (2010)
Soda Pictures/Red Flag Releasing
How do you make a movie that feels like 1967? Is it a special type of film stock? A perfectly chosen soundtrack? A kaleidoscope of peace signs and bell-bottoms? In the case of “Norwegian Wood” — the film adaptation of the Haruki Murakami novel — director Tran Anh Hung tapped into something much more nuanced and ethereal in his treatment of the story of two lost college students in love (or lust) in 1960s’ Tokyo.
Continue reading “This Bird Has Flown” »