Cinemas of Poetry and Violence: The 40th International Film Festival Rotterdam (2010)
Rotterdam’s edge is intact despite increasing hints of commercialism
Category: Movies
Directors · Festivals & Awards
A Handful of Keepers: The 40th New Directors/New Films Festival
“Kudos to the Vegas for showing not only the grimness of hustling, but also the ordinariness. As Clemente dresses, his middle-aged, matronly partner puts on her reading glasses to count the cash.”
Slash and Burn: Revisiting William Friedkin’s The Hunted (2003)
“Putting the pain back into violence is Friedkin’s real achievement in The Hunted, and indeed his unfashionable, irony-free approach helps explain why the film never found its audience in a decade where torture porn induced new depths of numbness in viewers.”
Dream Girls: On Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica and Cathering Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty
“When you fall in love with someone who is asleep, are you attracted to her spirit, some ineffable essence in her being? Or are you skating on the edge between voyeurism and necrophilia?”
Sleeping Beauties
The Strange Case of Angelica, dir. Manoel de Oliveira Sleeping Beauty, dir. Catherine Breillat On the face of it, the story of sleeping beauty should be a terrible subject for[…]
Her Eyes Were Wide and Glazed: The Uncanny Valley part 2
These kids are aping anime, creating a dead look about their pupils, removing all glimmer of intelligence from their face as if trying to pass as a zombie in a post-Romero school environment, where any glimmer of humanity is met with devouring and slobber.
Four Seasons
Le Quattro Volte, dir. Michelangelo Frammartino Cold Weather, dir. Aaron Katz All of a sudden, reincarnation has become a major subject in contemporary film. In Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall[…]
Now’s the time for BOOM!
We live in a weird age, full of metatextual interconnectivity, zeitgeist-riding, and death. Now that Liz Taylor’s gone, and her legacy and oeuvre suddenly unearthed down to the most[…]
Now More than Ever: MY BODYGUARD (1980)
…if someone is beating the shit out of you and you just sit there and take it–and it winds up on the internet–you’re a wimp. If you fight back, you’re a felon. Good work, adults!
Pre-Code · Reviews · TV & Streaming
March Must-Sees: SAFE IN HELL tonight on TCM, Plus TRISTANA at BAM and a missing link
TONIGHT at 8 PM on TCM! SAFE IN HELL (1931) a very lurid pre-code in the RAIN tradition, directed by unflinching two-fisted auteur William PUBLIC ENEMY/NIGHT NURSE Wellman. TCM’s Roger[…]
Ac-Ac-Academy Notes
It’s an award show full of lost speech, from the literal stroke of Kirk Douglas to the stutters and confusion of presenters and recipients, to the SPEECH itself. reminding us[…]
Go SWAN GO!
Rooting for the Swan tonight. It’s truly revolutionary and daring, especially in its ending and overall vibe, much more so than KING’S SPEECH, which I think is it’s main competitor[…]
City Living: Enter the Void/Biutiful
Biutiful, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu Enter the Void, dir. Gaspar Noé Cities are hard to pin down on film. For decades, hardly anyone bothered to try. Usually they’re just scenery,[…]
TWO SECONDS to Noirville
Is Two Seconds (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) the first American noir? I’ve read some historians who trace American film noir as far back as Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927). But Underworld,[…]
A Little Something for Everyone: Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan
“I never see you lose yourself.”
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: The Black Pirate, Night of the Hunter, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Howl, The Elia Kazan Collection
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
Not Us at All: On Des Hommes et des Dieux (Of Gods and Men)
“At the moment of greatest peril, the monks respond by having a little soirée.”
Metropolis, the Reconstructed Original Cut: Does It Make Sense? Does It Need To?
“The resurrection of Fritz Lang’s original cut has revealed how well this film functions with its associative network of image layered onto an adventure/SF thriller, but the reasons for its mysterious pull coalesce into an x-factor that resists analysis.”
The Last American Ruffalo: Lisa Cholodenko’s Lesbian “Homespun” Family Values
“In order to rectify her own misery with judgmental, shrewish wino Annette, Julianne Moore has to suffer the shame of being caught cheating, the way Dick Cheney had to suffer the blame for all the waterboarding we needed to squash terrorism.”
Jew or No Jew? David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin tell the story of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in The Social Network
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