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[…]
Category: Reviews
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,[…]
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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Ten from 2010: Erich Kuersten
#7: “A story starring a child is allowed to be bloodcurdlingly violent without softening it with hand-holding guilt or apathetic abstraction.”
Festivals & Awards · Lists · Reviews
Ten from 2010: Jacob Mikanowski: Selections from the Chicago and Warsaw International Film Festivals
#7: “A family drama about the dangers of beekeeping.”
Miracles and Mysteries: On Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
“Boonmee establishes Weerasethakul as our reigning master of the spiritual style: no one else moves across the lines that separate animals from humans and the living from the dead with greater ease or less fuss.”
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.”
Erich Kuersten’s Top Ten of 2010
2010, the year movies crept off the screen and into the floorboards, the handhelds, the flats and the 3-Ds. Counting down to doomsday 2012, I hope more films like THE BLACK SWAN and ENTER THE VOID come our way.
WINTER’S BONE and the Rural Noir
Although most film noirs take place in an urban setting, the “dark city,” Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) shows how the noir vision can thrive almost anywhere – it is[…]
Of Gods and Men
Des Hommes et des Dieux, dir. Xavier Beauvois On the night of March 26, 1996, seven Trappist monks were abducted from the Monastery of Tibhirine in Algeria by members of[…]
DVD REVIEW: The Nightmare Emerges: Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos (Criterion Collection)
by MATTHEW SORRENTO Guillermo del Toro has discussed how his childhood helped mold his imagination – being raised in a stern Roman Catholic family only fueled his dark fantasies. His[…]
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or[…]
Revisiting DUNE (1984) with Sean Young
Consider the following plotline: A young man travels to another world where he infiltrates the indigenous people and adopts their ways. He is befriended by a beautiful young woman who[…]
Review: Czech Reparation and Reconciliation in Kawasaki’s Rose
by Matthew Sorrento Films often speculate about how we’d react should a partner we thought dead (or approaching death) suddenly reappear. In Cast Away, Tom Hanks’ character returns home to[…]
That’s My Girl! Well, actually, she’s not. But we love each other anyway.
What do Bellissima (Visconti, 1951) and The Unknown Woman/La Sconsciuta (Zamarion/ Tornatore, 2006) have in common? Apart from being examples of Italian Cinema randomly connected by my recent viewing, the answer is they[…]
John Cassavetes as Machine Gun McCain (1969)
Film scholar David Bordwell describes – dismisses? – crime films as venues for showy roles, opportunities for actors to break away from their comfort zones and find their bad selves.[…]
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