Written by Alison Willmore, the all-seeing Indie Eye blog reads the news so you don't have to. (Well, maybe just the A & E section).
Alison Willmore
is the editor of IFC.com's film coverage and one of the site's video hosts. Follow her at twitter.com/indie_eye
Email: ifcblog (at) ifc dot com
Critic wrangle
Critic wrangle: "Frost/Nixon."
By Alison Willmore on 12/05/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleA quick look at what my favorite critics have to say about "Frost/Nixon," Ron Howard's extremely shiny adaptation of Peter Morgan's play about the 1977 televised interviews between British TV personality David Frost and former president Richard Nixon, played, respectively, by Michael Sheen and Frank Langella, both reprising their stage roles. MORE »
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Critic wrangle: "A Christmas Tale."
By Alison Willmore on 11/14/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleArnaud Desplechin's haute holiday tale "A Christmas Tale" is probably my favorite film of the year, barring a few yet-unseen stragglers like "Benjamin Button," and from the reviews it'll probably make plenty of critic top ten lists. Therefore Armond White at the New York Press dutifully dislikes it, though despite the requisite snipe at the hipster hoards, he can't summon much heat, sighing that the film is "the latest pretext for director Arnaud Desplechin to wax ironic," but allowing that "A Christmas Tale isn't repugnant, just regressive."... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Slumdog Millionaire."
By Alison Willmore on 11/12/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleHalf grimy portrait of Mumbai poverty, half fable by way of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," Danny Boyle's new film "Slumdog Millionaire" was a hit at Toronto, where it won the Audience Award, and is a solid candidate for a sleeper hit in the new "Juno" sense of the term, given that the film's from an established director and cost a reported $15 million (cheap!). Will it sleeper its way to an Oscar nomination? It's certainly edgily feel-good; as Manohla Dargis at the New York Times puts it, "this proves to be one of the most upbeat stories about... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "JCVD."
By Alison Willmore on 11/07/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleGenius? Overrated? Jean-Claude Van Damme plays "himself" in Mabrouk El Mechri's meta-drama "JCVD," caught in a bank robbery gone wrong in a trip back to Brussels to recuperate. It's a film I enjoyed the hell out of, though general critical word is mixed, or perhaps just more bemused. At New York, David Edelstein calls it "the most amazing piece of acting I've ever seen by a martial artist. But the film itself doesn't rise above the level of a good try." Scott Tobias at the Onion AV Club sums the film up as "a canny piece of autobiography that looks... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas."
By Alison Willmore on 11/07/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleAmong a certain group of critics, the mere mention of Roberto Benigni's Holocaust... dramedy?... "Life is Beautiful" is enough to provoke hours of enraging ranting. It's doubtful that Mark Herman's "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" will endure in theaters or memory long enough to be worth such a reaction, but there's still plenty of outrage to go around. An adaptation of John Boyne's child POV novel about Bruno, whose Nazi-commander father is transferred by "the Fury", family is tow, to "Out-With," where "farmers" wearing "striped pajamas" mill around behind a fence, among them a young boy Bruno befriends, "The... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Zack and Miri Make a Porno."
By Alison Willmore on 10/31/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleI liked Kevin Smith's rom-com just fine when I caught it at Fantastic Fest last month, though I'm getting pretty tired of the Smith/Apatow tendency to obscure sappiness with poop jokes. Own it or get over it, boys. The critics are all over the place with "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," which is either heartfelt, tiresome or both. On the pro side: Roger Ebert, who compares Smith, favorable, to a line cook, and Robert Wilonsky at the Village Voice, who shrugs that "nothing about Zack and Miri feels terribly fresh, much less transgressive," but adds that "there is something... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "What Just Happened?"
By Alison Willmore on 10/17/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangle"And Bruce Willis as himself" -- Barry Levinson's industry satire "What Just Happened?" wasn't the buzzy Sundance hit those who made it clearly had expected, despite a bright and shiny cast of biggish names like Robert De Niro, Robin Wright Penn, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci. Catherine Keener and the aforementioned Willis. In theaters today, it's generated mixed reviews -- I'd count myself amongst the many that seem impatient with continued tales of high-larious Hollywood woe. "What Just Happened? is a doodle, but its aura of dread seems earned," writes David Edelstein at New York, saluting De Niro's "killer timing" and... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Filth and Wisdom."
By Alison Willmore on 10/17/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleAh, it's been a while, By the way, did you hear Madonna made a movie? "Filth and Wisdom" came out of its premiere at Berlin this year with some of the expected scorching reviews and a few others that noted, with a shrug, that the movie wasn't actually so bad, which about reflects the reviews not that it's reached theaters. And why not? As Manohla Dargis notes at the New York Times, the film "is a ridiculously easy target, but it also creaks and strains with more ambition than most mainstream throwaways that just recycle the usual guns and poses,"... MORE »
"Burn After Reading": The trades say yes! And no!
By Alison Willmore on 08/27/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangle, FestivalsThe early reviews of the Coens' "Burn After Reading," which opens the Venice Film Festival tonight, are out, and they're up, down and all over the place. Todd McCarthy at Variety thinks the film finds the brothers C retreating "to sophomoric snarky mode," bemoaning the fact that the "seriously talented cast has been asked to act like cartoon characters." The Coens' script, which feels immature but was evidently written around the same time as that for "No Country," is just too fundamentally silly, without the grounding of a serious substructure that would make the sudden turn to violence catch the... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Trouble the Water."
By Alison Willmore on 08/22/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleAnother Sundance film, this one the winner of the Grand Jury Prize, also hits theaters today -- Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's documentary about New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, "Trouble the Water," uses footage shot by Lower Ninth Ward resident Kimberly Robert to chronicle the devastation of the storm. And reviews would indicate it does so aptly: Jim Ridley, writing at the Village Voice, calls it "history captured in the visual grammar of Cloverfield," and adds that "[t]he resilience of the movie's subjects--survivors of street crime and drugs and HIV--irradiates Trouble the Water like sunshine." Manohla Dargis at... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Momma's Man."
By Alison Willmore on 08/22/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleThe theaters have been so awash in stories of stunted development that it seems unfair to summarize "Momma's Man," the third feature from Azazel Jacobs, the best film I saw at Sundance and one of my favorites from the year to date. But yeah, it is about how a 30-something man-child (Matt Boren) essentially moves back in with his parents -- except, in this case, the father and mother are played by the director's real-life pop and mom, avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and his gravely compelling wife Flo. The film's shot almost entirely in the crazily cluttered downtown loft in... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Vicky Cristina Barcelona."
By Alison Willmore on 08/15/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleAs many have pointed out, it's damning "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" with faint praise to call it Woody Allen's best film since "Match Point," a minimal achievement if ever there was one. I liked the film at Cannes, and like it even more in retrospect, where it seems a little crueler, for all that it looks like a soft-focus sex farce. Reviews are, for the most part, quite good. "[M]aybe it was the Gaudi architecture or the restorative Mediterranean breeze," muses Michael Koresky at indieWIRE, "but on a very basic level, 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona' works, flowing along even and steady, and... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "A Girl Cut in Two."
By Alison Willmore on 08/15/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleIt's the week of the twilight auteurs, with films from the 72-year-old Woody Allen, the 88-year-old Eric Rohmer and the 78-year-old and still intimidatingly prolific Claude Chabrol in theaters. "A Girl Cut in Two" is vintage Chabrol in its themes. For most critics, that seems to be just fine. J. Hoberman at the Village Voice calls the film "a spry piece of work," adding that "although directed for mordant comedy, the spectacle of a naïve, lower-middle-class woman's misadventures in a nest of wealthy vipers is initially unsettling and ultimately gut-wrenching." The New York Times' Manohla Dargis writes that the film... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "In Search of a Midnight Kiss."
By Alison Willmore on 08/01/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleIt's been over a year since Alex Holdridge's "In Search of a Midnight Kiss" premiered at Tribeca 2007, in which time his "misanthrope seeks misanthrope" blind date romance has rounded the film festival bases from Edinburgh to Sarajevo to Mill Valley to Austin to Thessaloniki. Now in theaters, it's attracting some interestingly considered, if mixed, reviews (and is the lone focus of the New Yorker's film column this week), with many calling out its portrayal of Los Angeles. Take Scott Foundas at the Village Voice, who leads with "Did Los Angeles sign with a new agent?" He finds that "Holdridge's... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Frozen River."
By Alison Willmore on 08/01/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleI really didn't care for Courtney Hunt's feature debut "Frozen River" when I caught it at Sundance, but others did, to the point where it won the Grand Jury Prize, was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics, opened New Directors/New Films and now, in theatrical release, is receiving mostly praise, while star Melissa Leo's name is being idly tossed around by the early Oscar-watching crowd. Her nervy, ego-free performance is without a doubt the main reason to watch the film. Amongst the praise: Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly observes that "as written and directed by Courtney Hunt, the movie is... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Full Battle Rattle."
By Alison Willmore on 07/11/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleNo critic would argue that Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss haven't found themselves a fascinating subject in their doc "Full Battle Rattle," which opened Wednesday and which focuses on Medina Wasl, a fake Iraqi village filled with real Iraqi exiles that's the final stop for soldiers heading for all-too-real Iraq deployment -- a massive, Army-run simulation. Whether "Full Battle Rattle" succeeds as a film is a point of debate for some, though again, reviews are mostly positive. "Full Battle Rattle is an indelible vision of modern war, a not-so-fun fun-house mirror of the Iraq occupation," writes David Edelstein at New... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "The Exiles."
By Alison Willmore on 07/11/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangle"The Exiles," Kent MacKenzie's 1961 black and white film about a Native American couple living in a now-demolished Los Angeles neighborhood, has been restored and finally gets a theatrical release today from Milestone Films, the company that last year brought Charles Burnett's long-lost "Killer of Sheep" to cinemas and plenty of critics' top ten lists. "The Exiles," while getting a fair amount of love, doesn't quite have "Killer of Sheep"s cinematic holy glow. Manohla Dargis at the New York Times calls the film "a beautifully photographed slice of down-and-almost-out life, a near-heavenly vision of a near-hell that Mr. Mackenzie situated... MORE »
"The Dark Knight" is De Palma plus Coppola plus Kubrick plus Cronenberg?
By Alison Willmore on 07/10/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangle"No matter how good 'The Dark Knight' is," writes Steven Zeitchik at the Hollywood Reporter's Risky Business blog, "how mindblowingly, dazzlingly, pulsatingly, wish-Heath-was-still-here good -- is it better than 'Casablanca' or 'Lawrence of Arabia?' " It's not an entirely rhetorical question, at least in that the feverish early reviews have swung for some eyebrow-raisingly high fences: David Poland: "This is not a Batman movie... this is a 2008 version of The Untouchables with The Batman as Elliot Ness, The Joker as Al Capone, much better toys, and, it seems, a topper." Peter Travers: "It's enough to watch Bale chillingly render... MORE »
Sounding the depths of "Hancock."
By Alison Willmore on 07/02/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleSorry for the radio silence — vacation, then the always more challenging vacation recovery. I know I'm not the only one to have mentally written off "Hancock" once its marketing campaign stopped presenting it as a comedy and started pitching it as an action movie, indicating that studio higher-ups somewhere had begun to doubt the film's ability to generated Big Laffs, and decided to pretend it was never really intended to generate said Laffs to begin with. Despite what look to be some awesome tonal problems, "Hancock" has the most promisingly complex premise of the summer tentpoles, and while the... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "My Winnipeg."
By Alison Willmore on 06/13/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleGuy Maddin's "docu-fantasia" "My Winnipeg," about a town almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the Manitoban urban center in which he grew up, opens in theaters today. And the crowd goes wild! Or at least murmurs appreciatively. "Even though much of My Winnipeg is overtly ludicrous--from the corrupt judging of male beauty pageants in The Hudson's Bay Company's "Paddle Room" to Maddin's memories of a locally produced TV series about an overly sensitive man who spends every episode out on a ledge, threatening to kill himself," writes Noel Murray at the Onion AV Club, "the movie still touches on real... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Chris & Don. A Love Story."
By Alison Willmore on 06/13/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangle"Chris & Don. A Love Story" is a documentary about the longterm romance between artist Don Bachardy and "Berlin Stories" writer Christopher Isherwood — the two met when Bachardy was 18 and Isherwood some 30 years older, and were together, openly, for three decades, through times not always hospitable to gay relationships. Tina Mascara and Guido Santi directed; Bachardy is now 74 and Isherwood passed away over 20 years ago. Grouping "Chris & Don" with Derek Jarman doc "Derek," Armond White at the New York Press writes that "These gay documentaries show more loving than today's gay film fiction... by... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Operation Filmmaker."
By Alison Willmore on 06/04/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleLiev Schreiber, prepping for his directorial debut "Everything is Illuminated" in 2004, was captivated by a segment of MTV's "True Life: I'm Living in Iraq" featuring Muthana Mohmed, a charismatic Iraqi film student shown searching for books on cinema in the Baghdad bazaars, his school and filmmaking dreams destroyed by the war. Schreiber invited Mohmed to come to Prague and serve as a PA on the film, and director Nina Davenport to document this act of liberal good will (and good publicity) that soon goes fascinatingly awry, the journey (and convenient metaphor for the U.S./Iraq relationship) becoming the documentary "Operation... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "The Fall."
By Alison Willmore on 05/09/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleA labor of love from Tarsem Singh (who often prefers to go by just "Tarsem"), the musical video director who made his feature debut with 2000's "The Cell," "The Fall" was paid for out of pocket by the filmmaker and shot over the course of four years. The film, about a movie stuntman (played by "Pushing Daisies"' Lee Pace) who narrates a fantastical story to the five-year-old girl with whom he's in the hospital, is certainly visually striking, but reviews are mixed as to how well it all actually comes together. "[L]acking the ability to fashion cohesive tales driven by... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Battle for Haditha."
By Alison Willmore on 05/09/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleDocumentarian provocateur Nick Broomfield, of "Biggie and Tupac" and "Kurt & Courtney," goes semi-scripted in "Battle for Haditha," which portrays a real and ugly incident involving 24 Iraqi men, women and children, all civilians, who were killed by a group of United States Marines, possibly in retaliation for the earlier death of one of their own. Broomfield uses non-professional actors, many former military, in his film, which begs comparison to Brian De Palma's "Redacted" but is certainly getting a better reception from the critics. Certainly most see it as more balanced — New York's David Edelstein compares it to the... MORE »
"Speed Racer": May cause bodily harm?
By Alison Willmore on 05/08/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangle"Imagine someone pouring hot, melted Starburst candies into your corneas, and you just begin to approximate the experience of 'Speed Racer.'" —Alonso Duralde at MSNBC "Watching Speed Racer... is comparable to dousing one's eyeballs in a sugary hyper-digitized Skittles soup. It's like being immersed in a kaleidoscopic pop-art LSD nightmare in which one's bounced around a pinball machine and assailed by an onslaught of electric smoke tendrils." —Nick Schager at Slant "But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls?" —Anthony Lane at the New Yorker "The Wachowski... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Son of Rambow."
By Alison Willmore on 05/02/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleHere's my review from Sundance last year. "Son of Rambow," the second film from music video team Hammer & Tongs, whose first was the not so well received "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," is long in coming — it was delayed due to a legal struggle with StudioCanal over use of footage from "Rambo: First Blood." Word is, again, mixed on the way whimsical film about two children shooting their own sequel to Stallone's action film. Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly sighs that director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith "display plenty of whirligig energy, if not much control... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Mister Lonely."
By Alison Willmore on 05/02/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleWord is mixed on "Mister Lonely," former indie poster child Harmony Korine's first theatrical release since 1999's "Julien Donkey-Boy." The film, which premiered at Cannes last year, stars Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator who ends up at a remote Scottish colony composed entirely of celebrity impersonators, among them Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) and Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant). In an alternate storyline, Werner Herzog plays a priest presiding over skydiving nuns. Most critics are just lukewarm,: Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer offers "the faint praise of Mister Lonely as the least offensive of the works in the... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?"
By Alison Willmore on 04/18/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleOn to another doc in Morgan Spurlock style, this one actually made by Morgan Spurlock. "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" attracted a lot of attention when the Weinstein Company picked it up on the basis of just 15 minutes of footage shown to buyers at Berlin last year, and later because of rumors that Spurlock actually, you know, found bin Laden. Well, he didn't (it was a big ask), and the doc's been generating lukewarm reviews since its premiere at Sundance, and similar ones now that it's receiving a theatrical release. The major complaint from critics seems... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed."
By Alison Willmore on 04/18/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleThe dark side of the festival circuit? Never quite getting over bouts of mystery festival flu. To take my mind off my persistent, certainly tubercular cough, here's a quick look at some of the finer points from reviews of Ben Stein's fascinatingly loopy creationist doc "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," a film that's attracted most of its controversy due to who hasn't been allowed to see it at advance screenings. Jeannette Catsoulis at the New York Times calls the film "one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time," adding: "Mixing physical apples and metaphysical oranges at every... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "The Flight of the Red Balloon."
By Alison Willmore on 04/04/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleHou Hsiao-hsien's first film outside of Asia, the luminous "The Flight of the Red Balloon," uses Albert Lamorisse's 1956 children's short "The Red Balloon" as a counterpoint to its scarce story of a frazzled Parisian single mother (Juliette Binoche) navigating personal troubles, a career in puppetry and the raising of her seven-year-old son with the help of the Chinese film student (Song Fang) she's hired as a nanny. My review from Cannes last year (written before the film was acquired by our sister company IFC Films) is here. I love "The Flight of the Red Balloon," and so do most... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Run, Fat Boy, Run."
By Alison Willmore on 03/28/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleEveryone loves Simon Pegg, but few are willing to extend that sentiment to his new film "Run, Fat Boy, Run," a rom-com about a London slacker (Pegg) who tries to win back the woman (Thandie Newton) he left at the altar by running a marathon, also happens to be David Schwimmer's directorial debut. "I wouldn't believe that Run, Fat Boy, Run was co-written by Simon Pegg (of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) if he weren't up there on the screen in teeny briefs and with his gut stuck out, trying to endear himself to the American audience in... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Stop-Loss."
By Alison Willmore on 03/28/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleNine years after Kimberly Peirce's first film "Boys Don't Cry" hit theaters, her follow-up, "Stop-Loss," opens, an unlikely MTV Films take on the Iraq War. (My review of the film from SXSW is here.) Scott Foundas at the LA Weekly suggests that Iraq-themed films are following the same arc as Vietnam-themed ones, which means that "Stop-Loss" serves "for today's audience, roughly the same cathartic purpose that movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter did for audiences of the '70s." Too much so, for him: "[T]he film so effectively reconstitutes its own Vietnam-homecoming touchstones that we can anticipate its every... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Chop Shop."
By Alison Willmore on 02/29/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleIn the follow-up to his acclaimed 2005 film "Man Push Cart," Ramin Bahrani returns to the unseen (well, at least on screen) underbelly of New York City with "Chop Shop," which follows the lives of Alejandro, an orphaned boy who, along with his teenage sister, struggles for survival amidst the junkyards and questionable auto body shops in Willets Point, Queens. The film opened in New York on Wednesday (check out an interview with Bahrani here) — once again, the critics applaud. David Edelstein at New York deems the film "a low-budget vérité triumph": "Chop Shop isn't so beautiful or artfully... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Chicago 10"
By Alison Willmore on 02/29/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangle"Chicago 10," Brett Morgen's doc about the eight anti-war protesters put on trial after the explosive 1968 Democratic National Convention, was the opening night film at Sundance last year, and finally makes it to theaters today. The doc is noteworthy for its mixing of archival footage with reenacted courtroom segments depicted in motion capture animation (Ã la Robert Zemeckis' "The Polar Express") with actors like Hank Azaria and Liev Schreiber reading the words of Abbie Hoffman and William Kunstler. It works for Andrew O'Hehir, who, in a Sundance-dated review at Salon, lauds the way Morgen goes about "ignoring or... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Diary of the Dead."
By Alison Willmore on 02/15/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleGeorge A. Romero's "Diary of the Dead" has been drawing mixed reactions since its premiere at Toronto -- some critics find the zombie update nothing short of brilliant, others heavy-handed and ponderous. Of the first school is Premiere's Glenn Kenny, who proclaims that "besides an examination of us-against-them and us-against-us politics and a trenchant commentary on the it's-okay-to-torture-under-the-'right'- circumstances mentality that's been foisted on the American public, Diary is one of the most revealing and fascinating critiques of image-making since Michael Powell's Peeping Tom." Scott Foundas at LA Weekly, in a hefty review that offers more depth than the... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "The Year My Parents Went on Vacation."
By Alison Willmore on 02/15/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleThe title of Cao Hamburger's "The Year My Parents Went on Vacation" is euphemistic. The main character, a 12-year-old boy named Mauro, is the child of activists in 70s Brazil who are forced to stow him with his grandfather and go underground in order to avoid arrest -- only his grandfather has died, and Mauro is instead cared for by the residents of his multi-ethnic São Paulo neighborhood. What has the potential to be (under darker auspices) a little sentimental is, according to the critics, in fact a little sentimental -- not necessarily a terrible thing. The New York... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "The Band's Visit."
By Alison Willmore on 02/08/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangle"The Band's Visit," the first feature from Israeli director Eran Kolirin, was Israel's Foreign Language Film Oscar submission until the Academy rejected it for having too much English dialogue. The film is about how an Egyptian police force brass band headed for a performance at the opening of an Arab cultural center ends up in the wrong town in Israel, and there's a lot of English because it's the only language the townspeople and the band members have in common. That a film that's actually about cross-cultural confusion and communication gets disqualified from the category makes the idea of a... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "In Bruges."
By Alison Willmore on 02/08/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleAfter a glowing critic reception as the opening night film at Sundance, playwright Martin McDonagh's feature debut "In Bruges" opens in theaters to somewhat more mixed reviews from our favorite critics. Liking it the most: Roger Ebert, who describes the film as "an endlessly surprising, very dark, human comedy," and raves that McDonagh "has made a remarkable first film, as impressive in its own way as 'House of Games,' the first film by David Mamet, who McDonagh is sometimes compared with." Also a fan is Glenn Kenny at Premiere, who notes that despite the film's marketing representing it as... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "The Witnesses."
By Alison Willmore on 02/01/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangleArmond White at the New York Press describes André Téchiné as "the best French director most Americans don’t know." "The Witnesses," Téchiné's latest film, focuses on a group of Parisian friends (among them Emmanuelle Béart and Michel Blanc) confronted with the onset of AIDS in 1984. Though it's a relatively quiet week for theatrical releases, the film, which opens in New York and California, is unlikely to be that inconceivable breakthrough that makes Téchiné a household name, but that's not for lack of love from the critics. White, who can't love one director without bashing another, takes a hachet... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Juno."
By Alison Willmore on 12/07/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle"Juno," the would-be sassy girl-child crossroads where "Little Miss Sunshine," "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Rushmore" meet, is being presented as this year's sleeper indie darling, the soft-beneath-the-snark candidate Fox Searchlight's hoping will sneak in to snag awards, hearts and box office dollars. We must admit, we watched it anticipating the fact that we would loathe it as we have many a heartfelt whimsyfest, but ended up laughing. But... also still sort of loathed it — there's something about the relentless accessorizing of layers of quirk on top of all of the characters that we couldn't get over when the film... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."
By Alison Willmore on 11/30/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleIn many ways, Julian Schnabel's often majestically off-putting presence in person makes the excellent reviews that "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is receiving all the more impressive — one never wants to encourage someone so secure in the conviction of his own genius. The film, which is based on the memoir Jean-Dominique Bauby dictated by blinking his left eyelid after a stoke left the rest of him paralyzed, is now looking like a major year-end best-of/award candidate. We liked it too, though not as much — our review from the New York Film Festival is here. "Whatever Schnabel’s... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Lions for Lambs."
By Alison Willmore on 11/09/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleThere seems to be something admirable about how pugilisticly didactic Robert Redford's "Lions for Lambs" is, with its spoonful of high-octane star Splenda to make the liberal guilt go down. And the film does have its unanticipated fans: Stephanie Zacharek at Salon acknowledges that it's "self-righteous, didactic, dramatically and visually static and, in places, extremely boring," yet also finds it works:Redford and [screenwriter Michael Matthew] Carnahan clearly intend it as a call to arms, which explains why the movie sometimes feels like a civics lesson, albeit one given by a moderately entertaining instructor. Still -- like a good civics... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "No Country For Old Men."
By Alison Willmore on 11/09/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleEven the New York Press' Armond White likes the Coen brothers' "No Country For Old Men," adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy: "It would be pathetic to reduce/praise No Country as a thriller. The Coens’ technique goes far beyond that. Moss, Chirgurh and Bell’s appointments with mortality lift the film from plot mechanisms to a confrontation with fate." Solid to delirious praise from most of the rest of our usual round of critics. We particularly liked this, from A.O. Scott at the New York Times:[T]he most lasting impression left by this film is likely to be the deep... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "American Gangster."
By Alison Willmore on 11/02/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle
We're going to attempt to do this short and sweet from the plus side down, as there's plenty of praise out there for Ridley Scott's "American Gangster" (it's also somehow already hit #148 on the IMDb top 250) though our usual round of critics are more mixed. (As we mentioned before, we didn't like the film, through not enough to feel motivated to write much up... seriously, it's kind of dull. And vaguely morally distasteful -- Scott softballs the Lucas character, which is understandable in that he's played by the eminently likable Denzel Washington, but there's never acknowledgment from Lucas... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten."
By Alison Willmore on 11/02/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleA few confessions regarding the impossibility of critical impartiality due to Clash fandom precede reviews of "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten," a doc from Julien Temple, who previously chronicled the Sex Pistols in "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" and "The Filth and the Fury." Among those 'fessing up, Andrew O'Hehir at Salon, who suggests that "Temple's film will inevitably be viewed by people of roughly my age and with roughly my background as a kind of generational myth, which is likely to irritate the crap out of everyone else," but who nevertheless labels it "the most powerful... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Fat Girls."
By Alison Willmore on 11/02/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle22-year-old Ash Christian wrote, directed, stars in and takes a bit of a critical beating for "Fat Girls," his film about a gay teenager in conservative Texas and his overweight best friend. Michael Koresky at indieWIRE uses the occasion of the film's hitting theaters to dwell on the current state of the gay coming-of-age tale, which, he writes, "has become as rote, unimaginative, and self-regarding as the mainstream teen dreck that crowds multiplexes."Case in point: Ash Christian's preening "Fat Girls," a film as crude as its title that treads such familiar ground that it's nearly impossible to distinguish from... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Slipstream."
By Alison Willmore on 10/26/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle"Slipstream" marks Anthony Hopkins' third turn behind the camera, and it is either a bravura break from the confines of traditional narrative filmmaking or astonishingly pretentious hooey. Most critics are voting for hooey, or, as Ed Gonzalez at Slant put it, "Holy caca!" ("Finally, the 'Nearer, Father, Nearer' video from Ghost World stretched to feature length!" he adds. Finally! Though we think it might actually be "Mirror, Father, Mirror," no?). "Not so much ill conceived and misdirected as unconceived and undirected, this is folly on a grand scale," claims Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Chicago Reader, while Noel Murray at... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Before The Devil Knows You're Dead."
By Alison Willmore on 10/26/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleSidney Lumet's last film, "Find Me Guilty," trickled in and back out of theaters last year before most had a chance to even notice that it starred Vin Diesel... with hair! A box office flop, the affable mafia courtroom comedy did have its critical defenders, though others greeted it with a shrug — fine, but nothing on Lumet's '70s glory days. But Lumet's latest, the bleak thriller "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," has no such indifference to overcome; amidst the overwhelming acclaim (the strength of which we're a bit surprised by — our own review from NYFF is... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Gone Baby Gone."
By Alison Willmore on 10/19/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleAfter failing to find a satisfactory place for himself in Hollywood as an actor, Ben Affleck has moved behind the camera to helm "Gone Baby Gone," a film which would seem to have all the right elements for his directorial debut: It's set in Affleck's native Boston, the city that housed "Good Will Hunting," the film that won him a screenwriting Oscar; it's an adaptation of a novel from Dennis Lehane, whose "Mystic River" was the basis of Clint Eastwood's (over)lauded 2003 film; it stars brother Casey, who happens to be having a pretty good year. And, to our... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Romance & Cigarettes."
By Alison Willmore on 09/07/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleArmond White at the New York Press sort of likes "Romance & Cigarettes," which generally does bode well for a film. Either way, it's only sort of: He admires the way director John Turturro takes the movie-musical seriously, and the way the film "expresses a deep love of pop," but dislikes moments in which the movie "becomes cute and campy. Turturro understands the emotion inside musicals but is too skeptical, or ultimately unskilled, to treat them with coherent depth." At Salon, Andrew O'Hehir loves it, called it "the most original picture by an American director I've seen this year,... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "In the Shadow of the Moon."
By Alison Willmore on 09/07/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleThere's magic on the moon; most critics are enchanted by David Sington's doc about the moon missions, "In the Shadow of the Moon," which includes previously unseen footage from space. Watching it, Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman finds himself transported by "a feeling that came as a shock: not just the usual admiration and ooh-and-ah wonder, but a bedrock nostalgia for an age when technology could seem innocent — when it was infused, on a mass scale, with mystical humanist longing." At Salon, Andrew O'Hehir notes the "heart-stoppingly beautiful footage," but prefers the astronaut interviews:It's a fascinating excursion into the... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Fierce People."
By Alison Willmore on 09/07/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle"Fierce People," like "Romance & Cigarettes," is an actor-turned-director project that's been drifting in limbo for two years. Here, the helmer is Griffin Dunne, who behind the camera has turned out mostly forgettable fare like "Practical Magic" and in-jokey indie mockumentary "Lisa Picard Is Famous." In "Fierce People," he's adapting a novel by Dirk Wittenborn (who also wrote the screenplay) about a young man (Anton Yelchin) who moves with his coke-addicted masseuse mother (Diane Lane) to the estate of an aging billionaire (Donald Sutherland). And, as it turns out, there's something to that "marketing challenge" that director Dunne has... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "The Hunting Party."
By Alison Willmore on 09/07/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleSomeone out there thought Richard Shepard's last film, one-joke pony "The Matador," was good enough to merit another film with bigger stars, and so we have "The Hunting Party," a satire featuring Richard Gere as a burnt-out journalist looking for the number one war criminal in Bosnia and Terrence Howard as his cameraman, a story adapted from a 2000 Esquire article by Scott Anderson. It works for Robert Wilonsky at the Village Voice, who declares that "Shepard...is becoming a master at finding the right tone, balancing the seriousness of his characters' purpose with the madness of their intentions. He's... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "The Nanny Diaries."
By Alison Willmore on 08/24/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle"American Splendor" directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini take on Emma Mclaughlin and Nicola Kraus' chick-lit roman à clef about a nanny's involvement with a monstrous Upper East Side family, and, according to most reviews, no one in "The Nanny Diaries" emerges the winner. "Especially at the beginning of 'The Nanny Diaries' there are signs that its directing and writing team had a different movie in mind," notes the New York Times' Stephen Holden, who finds, regardless, the film "consists mostly of soapsuds," its sole saving grace Laura Linney as Mrs. X, the mother of Annie (Scarlett Johansson)... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Resurrecting The Champ."
By Alison Willmore on 08/24/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleIt's a film about boxing. It's a film about journalism. It's a film about dads. It's "Resurrecting The Champ," the new film from former film critic Rod Lurie, following a sports journalist (Josh Hartnett) who writes a piece about a homeless man who claims to be a once great pro boxer (Samuel L. Jackson). Tasha Robinson at the Onion AV Club finds the film another instance in which director Lurie "seems ambitious beyond his means," presenting "a story that works well, except when it's loudly proclaiming its own emotional depth and significance... Champ is a solid effort with a... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Right At Your Door."
By Alison Willmore on 08/24/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle"Right At Your Door" is an indie disaster movie, a description that would seem inherently at odds with itself, but actually just calls for a judicious set up: here, L.A. is hit with dirty bombs (an urban trauma scenario that inevitably evokes 9/11), but the film focuses in on a man (Rory Cochrane) who's sealed himself inside his house just as his possibly contaminated wife (Mary McCormack) makes it home. Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly is a fan:[T]his smart, coolly horrifying American indie thriller one of the scariest movies you're likely to see all year — a post-9/11 nightmare... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)."
By Alison Willmore on 08/17/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleJason Kohn's "Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)" explores poverty, kidnapping, corruption and frogs eating each other in Brazil, and it picked up the Grand Jury and Cinematography prizes at Sundance earlier this year. Andrew O'Hehir at Salon calls the film "gorgeous and terrifying film" if also confusing: "Not merely does it give you a vertiginous overview of the colorful, divided, violent and intensely fucked-up nature of Brazilian society; it tries to reinvent documentary technique as it does so." David Edelstein at New York deems the film "gripping"; Scott Foundas, over at Variety, notes the its debt to Errol Morris... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "The 11th Hour."
By Alison Willmore on 08/17/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleLeo DiCaprio follows in Al Gore's surprise-hit footsteps with environmental warning doc "The 11th Hour." Despite offering a message we've heard before, the film, which sisters Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen directed and DiCaprio produced, co-wrote and narrates, is attracting generally decent reviews for its attempts optimism and pragmatism. As Manohla Dargis at the New York Times notes, No matter how well intentioned, political documentaries that present problems without real-life, real-time, real-people solutions — an 800 number, an address, something — just add to the noise (pollution), becoming another title on some filmmaker’s résumé as well as a... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "2 Days in Paris."
By Alison Willmore on 08/10/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleJulie Delpy takes on her near iconic role as Celine in Linklater's "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset" in "2 Days in Paris," which she wrote, directed and stars in. Takes on, or perhaps shreds to bits in playing Marion, the temperamental French half of a New York couple at the tail end of a rough European vacation — Adam Goldberg plays Jack, her neurotic boyfriend. "You won't get a sense, right away, of how borderline-crazy '2 Days in Paris' is going to get from its first few minutes. Which are frankly pretty irritating," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. The... MORE »
Critic wrangle: "Rocket Science."
By Alison Willmore on 08/10/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle"Rocket Science," the second film and first scripted effort from Jeffrey Blitz, the director of the excellent doc "Spellbound," is definitely a Sundance film, but one that we liked well enough (our review from the festival is here) and one that manages to dart in some unexpected, if not revelatory, directions in its tale of Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson), a withdrawn stutterer who's recruited for the debate team by his crush. As Stephen Holden at the New York Times wisely observes, "This is a genre that insists (often annoyingly) on flaunting a supposedly rarefied sensibility. Your affection for 'Rocket... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Interview."
By Alison Willmore on 07/13/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleWe've yet to figure out what people actually think of Theo Van Gogh as a filmmaker — murdered by an Islamic extremist in 2004, the Dutch provocateur is best known as an uneasy martyr for free speech, one who was fond of inflammatory public statements, among them frequently referring to Muslims as geitenneukers: goat-fuckers. Only three of his films are available here on DVD, and two of those, the cynic in us feel obliged to point out, were released after his well-publicized death. This Steve Buscemi-directed remake of his 2003 "Interview" is the most exposure a Van Gogh film... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Talk to Me."
By Alison Willmore on 07/13/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleDon Cheadle plays D.C. radio personality and activist Petey Greene to Chiwetel Ejiofor's straight-laced radio program director Dewey Hughes in this biopic from director Kasi Lemmons, who made some noise a decade ago (and won the adoration of Roger Ebert) with the Spirit Award-winning "Eve's Bayou." Stephanie Zacharek at Salon describes the film as "an imperfect picture that's alive every minute, a movie that perfectly captures the vibe of a person, a place, a time and a way of being, and even gets, indirectly and without a whiff of sanctimoniousness, to the heart of what being an American ought... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "The Ghosts of Cité Soleil."
By Alison Willmore on 06/29/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Ghosts of Cité Soleil": Danish filmmaker Asger Leth dove into what the U.N. has called the most dangerous place on earth, the titular slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to make this doc, which centers on two brothers, gangleaders and would-be hip-hop artists. The film "is only barely coherent as a documentary," writes Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly, "but then, I'm not sure I'd even use that word to describe it. It's closer to a bulletin: nerve-shattered fragments from the edge." These sentiments are echoed by J. Hoberman at the Village Voice, who wonders at the access given the... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Evening."
By Alison Willmore on 06/29/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Evening": When a film with this kind of pedigree — it's based on a novel by Susan Minot; adapted by Minot and Michael Cunningham; directed by Lajos Koltai, whose "Fateless" was the most beautiful-looking film to ever be made about the Holocaust, a fact that makes its lack of sentimentality all the more piercing; and stars an avalanche of respected actresses, among them Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep, Natasha Richardson, Claire Danes and Toni Collette — gets buried in the height of the summer far from awards season, it's generally a sign that the film is a dog of... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Sicko," "A Mighty Heart."
By Alison Willmore on 06/22/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Sicko": "Sicko" is only open in New York this week, so we'll be returning to it in the next as more reviews are published. So far, so relatively good for the latest film from Michael Moore, whose wielding of the documentary as a polemical tool has not always endeared him to cinephiles or those hoping for balance. J. Hoberman at the Village Voice notes that "[a]s filmmaking, Sicko sometimes resembles an infomercial for Ozark real estate and elsewhere demonstrates a Kenneth Anger-like flare for vertical montage." He finds the film's collection of health care horror stories "devastating," but... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Fido," "Eagle Vs. Shark," "Lights in the Dusk."
By Alison Willmore on 06/15/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Fido": Andrew Currie's film, the latest zombie reevaluation to hit theaters, is intended more to provoke laughs and poke fun at "Lassie" then to carry a message of social import. That just fine by David Edelstein at New York, who describes the film as "[a] shotgun wedding of George Romero and SCTV" and call it "madly funny—a treat for moviegoers who don’t mind gnawed-off limbs with their high jinks." Manohla Dargis at the New York Times concurs, deeming "Fido" a "ticklishly amusing satire" that doesn't push what could be seen as a slavery allegory: "Unlike Mr. Romero or... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "La Vie en Rose," "Pierrepoint - The Last Hangman," "12:08 East of Bucharest."
By Alison Willmore on 06/08/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "La Vie en Rose": Coming out of a splashy premiere at Berlin early this year, this Edith Piaf biopic garnered endless praise for Marion Cotillard's bravura lead performance and general bemusement and displeasure with the uneven direction of relative unknown (his last film was "Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse") Olivier Dahan. Similar themes are popping up in the reviews as the film opens in limited release today. "La Vie en Rose trudges dutifully from one costumed 'defining' event to the next, building up to a kind of Piaf theme park that plays out like a bad... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Crazy Love," "Ten Canoes."
By Alison Willmore on 06/01/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Crazy Love": Everyone we spoke to at Sundance, where "Crazy Love" had its premiere, was of the opinion that Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens too-good-not-to-be-true doc told a great story not particularly well, a complaint that could be applied to many a contemporary documentary. This thought is expressed in some of the film's reviews, though they're overall pretty positive. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, fresh out of Cannes, notes that the "film is a standard-issue documentary, combining period footage with talking-head interviews." Still, he loves those talking heads, and writes that "Klores renders them as recognizable human beings, more like... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "28 Weeks Later."
By Alison Willmore on 05/11/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleFor "I Don't Want To Sleep Alone," "Brand Upon The Brain!" and "Day Night Day Night," go here. + "28 Days Later...": What initially looked like a write-off — a sequel in which neither the original film's director or writer had any direct involvement beyond an executive producer credit, coming from Fox Atomic, whose titles thus far include "The Hills Have Eyes II" and "Turistas" and nothing else — is being heralded as a success and, possibly, that rare sequel that's better than its predecessor. And what director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo has delivered is no feel-good flick: as David Edelstein... MORE »
The mid-week's critic wrangle: Sleeping alone, brands, brains, day, night.
By Alison Willmore on 05/09/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone": Who could be more elliptical a filmmaker than Apichatpong Weerasethakul? Possibly his New Crowned Hope-commissioned colleague Tsai Ming-liang, whose seventh feature opens in New York today. "Albeit closer to ballet than drama, this urban nocturne is one of Tsai's most beautiful and naturalistic films—at least in terms of its rich, humid, almost viscous ambience," writes the Village Voice's J. Hoberman. "The narrative, however, is pure fable—complete with a mysterious ending that leaves the protagonist and his lovers bobbing like a cork on a sea of chaos." "On the subject of angles," adds... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Waitress," "Away From Her."
By Alison Willmore on 05/04/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Waitress": What would have happened if Adrienne Shelly's final film were a stinker? Most likely, it would have managed only a negligible release, and most critics would have been able to avert their gaze and avoid trashing the work of the recently murdered. Fortunately, "Waitress" is good, or at least good enough, slender and sweet-natured enough to attract reviews ranging from glowing to ruefully approving. "Waitress is a wee romantic charmer, a delectable Dixie screwball romp that never loses its spry sense of discovery," writes Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly, adding that "the movie is always high-spirited, but... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Zoo."
By Alison Willmore on 04/27/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleApologies, we're not going to have time to do a full critic round-up today, but we did get this far: + "Zoo": What can you say about a 45-year-old man who died? That he loved Seattle and engineering, his family, and having sex with full-sized Arabian stallions? Robinson Devor's documentary "Zoo," which circles the well-documented death of Kenneth Pinyan and looks into his life and lifestyle, attempts to strip sensationalism from a ripe topic by using a poetic, aesthetically striking approach (our review from Sundance is here; an IFC News interview with Devor is here). For Dana Stevens at Slate,... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Hot Fuzz," "Syndromes and a Century."
By Alison Willmore on 04/20/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Hot Fuzz": How good is the new film from Team Wright/Pegg? Good enough for even the New York Press' Armond White to overcome his dislike for hipsters and comedy to twice deem Wright's work "Godardian." He writes:It’s a British Music Hall version of the social myths that cop movies inherited from American westerns. They’re paying tribute to what is most human in an increasingly dehumanized pop genre now gone global. When Angel and Danny get inspired by a drugstore rack of cop-movie DVDs, these clichés are revitalized and given back their roots in cultural/social anxiety. This moment of... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: My dog is like a red, red road.
By Alison Willmore on 04/13/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleA little abrupt this week, we've had an unexpectedly busy day. + "Red Road": Generally fondness for Andrea Arnold's surveillance camera directorial debut, part of a (planned, at least) three film rule-bound set called Advance Party. "No one does poetic British miserabilism with more remorseless hyperrealism than the Scots," writes the LA Weekly's Ella Taylor, "and Arnold...directs with a precociously sure touch and a taste for raw, graphic sexuality that’s rare in a woman director, yet feels organic to the film’s paranoid, loveless milieu." Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE finds the film "combines elements of both no-nonsense realism and Foucaultian... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Grindhouse," "Black Book."
By Alison Willmore on 04/06/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Grindhouse": How to parse Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's double-feature homage to le cinéma d'exploitation? Most critics are heaping superlatives on the film; a few detractors aim careful barbs intended to deflate the expected praise, and yet "Grindhouse" seems to evade solid insights. Is it possible to analyze a film that so valiantly Samples from the big fans: Nathan Lee at the Village Voice gleefully observes that "Rodriguez, Tarantino, and Co. aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it's about goddamn time. Go wasted, go stoned, go without your parents' permission. In paying homage... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "The Lookout," "Killer of Sheep."
By Alison Willmore on 03/30/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Lookout": Much love for Joseph Gordon-Levitt's turn as a young man recovering from a serious head injury in "Out of Sight" screenwriter Scott Frank's directorial debut. He's "convincing as one of cinema’s most difficult archetypes: the reactive protagonist whose complex emotions are visible to the viewer but invisible to his fellow characters," writes Matt Zoller Seitz at the New York Times, who finds that there's a lot to like in the Kansas City-set neo-noir, even if it doesn't like up to its hype as the product of "one of Hollywood's great unproduced scripts." Robert Wilonsky at the... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Offside," "The Page Turner," "First Snow."
By Alison Willmore on 03/23/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Offside": Jafar Panahi may be Iranian cinema's most accessible filmmaker, and "Offside," a comedy about a group of girls who are caught attempting to disguise themselves and sneak in to a Bahrain-Iran World Cup qualifier match (women are banned from the stadium) is both entertaining and politically acrid (our New York Film Festival review of the film is here). At indieWIRE, Michael Koresky compares the film to another dealing with Iran (well, Persia) that's currently in theaters:[N]ot only does "Offside"'s very contemporary look at Iranian youth culture act as a nuanced corrective to Zack Snyder's conveniently "unintentional" Iran... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: The Wind That Shakes My Wife.
By Alison Willmore on 03/16/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Wind That Shakes The Barley": Ten months after it surprised many by winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, Ken Loach's film about the conflicts in early 20th century Ireland arrives in a few US theaters (and, as it's being released by IFC First Take, also on VOD). Reviews, as you'd expect given the pedigree, are generally good. David Denby at the New Yorker calls "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" "a beautifully realized work and perhaps Loach’s best film... Refusing the standard flourishes of Irish wildness or lyricism, Loach has made a film for our moment, a... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Zodiac," "Black Snake Moan," "Into Great Silence."
By Alison Willmore on 03/02/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Zodiac": David Fincher's highly anticipated chronicle of the Zodiac Killer, who haunted the San Francisco Bay Area and its surrounding areas in the late 60s into the 70s, does not disappoint the critics (we'll post our own review shortly). Amongst the film's biggest supporters are Nathan Lee, who, by his own admission, geeks out with one of the longest reviews we can recall running at the Village Voice. "As a crime saga, newspaper drama, and period piece, it works just fine. As an allegory of life in the information age, it blew my mind," he writes, calling out... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Amazing Grace," "Gray Matters," "The Wayward Cloud."
By Alison Willmore on 02/23/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Amazing Grace": Michael Apted may have earned his place in the canon with the "Up" series, but his career as a narrative filmmaker is far less irreproachable, encompassing the highs of "Coal Miner's Daughter" and the lows of "Enough." "Amazing Grace," a biopic about British abolitionist William Wilberforce (played by tasty slice of Welsh rarebit Ioan Gruffudd) (we have no idea what that's suppose to mean, but so rarely get to bring up rarebit on this blog), seems to be falling somewhere in the middle of the scale. Stephanie Zacharek at Salon writes that "In the first 10 minutes,... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Avenue Montaigne," "Bamako."
By Alison Willmore on 02/16/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Avenue Montaigne": Either "breezy but inconsequential" (Nick Schager at Slant) or "a humble pleasure" (Manohla Dargis at the New York Times), the latest film from Danièle Thompson, last seen in the US with her 2002 film "Jet Lag", was a hit in France and the country's submission for Best Foreign Language Film. The film seems to either charm or overcharm — the most fond may be Andrew O'Hehir at Salon, who calls the film "a delicious French pastry, tart and sweet, steeped in Parisian glamour." Others sum it up as a success in its own small way: Lisa... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Lives, souls and a nice chianti.
By Alison Willmore on 02/09/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Lives of Others": We've battled back a perverse urge to hate on Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut more than it deserves solely because of the overwrought praise it's being showered with ("overwrought" because we don't agree, natch — otherwise it would be "well-deserved"). No less than Anthony Lane of the New Yorker, supreme ruler of the Review As Excuse For Witticisms of Varying Quality, is moved to sincere acclamation:You might think that “The Lives of Others†is aimed solely at modern Germans—at all the Wieslers, the Dreymans, and the weeping Christa-Marias. A movie this strong, however, is... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Factory Girl," "The Situation,"
By Alison Willmore on 02/02/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Factory Girl": After garnering an impressive amount of gossip column inches for various perfunctory scandales, George Hickenlooper's Edie Sedgwick biopic finally arrives in theaters. At Slate, Dana Stevens sighs that "For a movie about the tumultuous friendships among artists, musicians, and filmmakers during one of the 20th century's periods of creative ferment, Factory Girl is remarkably incurious about cinema, music, and art." She faults the script for weighing the film down. At Slant, Ed Gonzalez sums the film up as yet another biopic "spectacles of bad accidents, VH1 aesthetics, sketchy (almost nonexistent) period detail, and armchair psychology," allowing... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Alpha Dog," "Tears of the Black Tiger"
By Alison Willmore on 01/12/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Alpha Dog": Oh, tragic poorly parented youth! Oh, Justin Timberlake! Nick Cassavetes' "inspired by a true story" teen crime drama shakes off lawsuits to arrive in theaters just about a year after it premiered at Sundance in 2006. Most aren't so fond. "Alpha Dog doesn't seem to have any feelings about its characters' misdeeds one way or another—it's intermittently bemused or tragic, but utterly lacking a conscience or a point of view," writes Scott Tobias at the Onion AV Club. He adds that "writer-director Cassavetes never picks a direction, so his look at a pointless tragedy wallows in... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Miss Potter," "Comedy of Power."
By Alison Willmore on 01/05/2007
Filed under: Critic wrangleIn a New Year's addition to bulk up our New Times-afflicted and release-overwhelmed critic wrangle, we're adding Slant and the Onion AV Club to the round-up. + "Miss Potter": Most are underwhelmed by "Miss Potter," the Beatrix Potter biopic from "Babe" director Chris Noonan. Stephen Holden at the New York Times declares "the cinematic equivalent of a delicate English tea cake whose substance is buried under too many layers of icing." Nathan Rabin at the AV Club does away with the metaphor and just calls the "Miss Potter" "oppressively twee" — he finds that the brief animated sequences are the... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: How good is that German, really?
By Alison Willmore on 12/15/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Good German": Not so good, according to most of the critics — Steven Soderbergh's dirrty 40s experiment seems to have left most cold. Manohla Dargis at the New York Times sighs that "while the language routinely waxes raw in 'The Good German,' the most striking difference between it and a Hollywood film like 'Casablanca' aren’t the expletives, the new film’s calculated cynicism or even that glimpse of bedroom coupling; it’s that the older film feels as if it was made for the satisfaction of the audience while the other feels as if it was made for that... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Dancing the Apocalypso.
By Alison Willmore on 12/08/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Apocalypto": On the pro side — Scott Foundas at LA Weekly declares the film "a virtuosic piece of action cinema," and beyond that, "while there has been no shortage of recent films that decry the horrors of war and man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, I know of none other quite this sickeningly powerful." Armond White at the New York Press is rapturous, writing:Apocalypto runs second to the year’s most extraordinary example of silent film art, Julián Hernández’s Broken Sky, where clueless critics complained about the lack of dialogue. Gibson transcends that cultural barrier by insisting on linguistic... MORE »
The midweek critic wrangle: "Inland Empire."
By Alison Willmore on 12/06/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleOur review from the New York Film Festival is here. We had forgotten until we started reading through the critics' attempts at parsing David Lynch's latest that it contains one of the most frightening shots we can think of — one consisting solely of a spotlit Laura Dern taking a lurching run at the camera. Seriously, it's really fucking unnerving. + "Inland Empire": J. Hoberman at the Village Voice declares the film "Lynch's most experimental film since Eraserhead. But unlike that brilliant debut (or its two masterful successors, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr.), it lacks concentration. It's a miasma.... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Is there no hope in Nazareth?" Cause there ain't in Brazil.
By Alison Willmore on 12/01/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Nativity Story": In one of the odder combinations of talent and target audience, "Thirteen" director Catherine Hardwicke helms a Biblical film that stars "Whale Rider"'s Keisha Castle-Hughes and several actors who are of the correct ethnicity for the time and place of the tale but who are, due to the ironic confluence of history, most familiar to audiences here for playing terrorism-related characters: Shohreh Aghdashloo, "24"'s Dina Araz; Alexander Siddig, who's also guested on "24" and who played the prince in "Syriana"; and, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-him role, Kais Nashif, the hot suicide bomber in "Paradise Now." At... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "For Your Consideration," "Fast Food Nation."
By Alison Willmore on 11/17/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "For Your Consideration": Critics are undecided as to how sharp a satire of Hollywood Christopher Guest has managed in his latest (and firmly non-mockumentary) effort. Nathan Lee at the Village Voice salutes the film for the way in which it "pulls off the neat trick of skewering the movie industry while remaking it in its own image." Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly writes that "the level of tender, ruthless, inspired, lethally accurate study that has gone into the follicular expression of each and every character in Christopher Guest's latest hilarious cultural corrective is something inspiring to behold." (She... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Better late than never.
By Alison Willmore on 11/10/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleWanted to pop our head in for a quick overview of Steven Shainberg's "imaginary portrait," the most noteworthy film of a not-so-noteworthy but certainly release-heavy week. + "Fur": "'Fur' is a folly, though not a dishonorable one," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. For her, a major problem is the present of Nicole Kidman, "whose talent cannot obscure that she has been grievously miscast and left to indulge her mannered coyness." David Denby, at the New Yorker, points out in our favorite review of the film that "The movie is meant to be an erotically charged version of... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Volver," "Borat."
By Alison Willmore on 11/03/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Volver": Everyone loves Almodóvar. And everyone loves Penélope Cruz. A.O. Scott at the New York Times claims thatWith this role Ms. Cruz inscribes her name near the top of any credible list of present-day flesh-and-blood screen goddesses, in no small part because she manages to be earthy, unpretentious and a little vulgar without shedding an ounce of her natural glamour.As for the film, he finds that "Mr. Almodóvar has made yet another picture that moves beyond camp into a realm of wise, luxuriant humanism." Stephanie Zacharek at Salon is rapturous about all of the actresses (she finds the... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Babel," "DoaP," Herzog.
By Alison Willmore on 10/27/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Babel": Swelling with importance or self-importance, Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel" arrives in theaters and divides the critics. Reoccurring thoughts: "Babel" is like "Crash," but better. The Japanese storyline is the most compelling. The connection of the Japanese storyline to the other two is a little thin. When you try to lay out the film's larger meaning, it's either elusive or a little silly. One of the fondest of the film is Slate's Dana Stevens, who writes that "Babel has great expectations for itself: It wants to be a movie about big ideas and big emotions at the same... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Marie," "Running," "Requiem" and "51 Birch Street."
By Alison Willmore on 10/20/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Marie Antoinette": It seems silly to label this film divisive — we liked it quite a bit, but we imagined responses to it would fall somewhere on a sliding scale of "Indifferent <-------> Enchanted." Then again, Sofia Coppola seems to inspire all the derision a girl auteur could ask for. On the yea side, we have: A recovering Roger Ebert, who writes "Every criticism I have read of this film would alter is fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film." A.O. Scott at the New York Times, who calls... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Some Scorsese guy, "Little Children," "Shortbus."
By Alison Willmore on 10/06/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Departed": We had a suspicion Martin Scorsese's latest wasn't going to be so great — no reason, except that perhaps it seemed a too good to be true. Scorsese returning to crime and criminals; Scorsese remaking "Infernal Affairs"; Scorsese doing Boston! Well, looks like we were wrong, thank gods. At LA Weekly, Scott Foundas calls "The Departed" "the best thing [Scorsese]'s done in ages," and while noting that he "wouldn’t rush to call the movie one of Scorsese's best," also concludes rather nicely that Indeed, the very vibrancy of this movie is tied to its familiarity, to... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: The king and queen.
By Alison Willmore on 09/29/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Last King of Scotland": Ah, we love the smell of award season on a Friday afternoon. Of Kevin Macdonald's portrait of Idi Amin: David Edelstein at New York writes that it is "phenomenally well directed," Stephanie Zacharek at Salon thinks that Macdonald, in what is his first feature, "seems to be in almost complete control of the material and its pacing." Slate's Dana Stevens is less ebullient: "'The Last King of Scotland' is wrenching to sit through, but in the end, it doesn't leave you with quite enough to think about"; LA Weekly's Ella Taylor suggests that... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "All the King's Men," "The Science of Sleep."
By Alison Willmore on 09/22/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "All the King's Men": After being brutalized at its premiere in Toronto, Steven Zaillian star-packed adapation of Robert Penn Warren's novel (adapted once before in 1949) limps into theaters to thwacked around by the critics again. Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Chicago Reader complains that "the unfocused story is so bereft of any clear sense of period or location that the political melodrama sometimes seems to be taking place inside a cigar box." A.O. Scott at the New York Times states flatly that "[n]othing in the picture works," and goes on that "[i]t is rare to see a movie... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Dahlia," darling.
By Alison Willmore on 09/15/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Black Dahlia": Sorry, Mr. De Palma, but your "dark side of vintage Hollywood film" is averaging out worse with the critics than "Hollywoodland," with added sighs of disappointment — this one, everyone really really wanted to like. On the plus side, the Village Voice's J. Hoberman writes that "Although the action set pieces are impressive, the exposition is sluggish. For all the posh dollies, high angles, and Venetian-blind crisscross patterns, The Black Dahlia rarely achieves the rhapsodic (let alone the delirious)." Wait, that's the good side? At Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman, also fairly generous to the film,... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Pretty dismal.
By Alison Willmore on 08/25/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleIf you judge your week-to-week quality of life solely on the basis of new theatrical releases, you're probably pretty unhappy about now. + "The Quiet": Jamie Babbit (of "But I'm a Cheerleader") has managed to get her suburban Gothic thriller released by Sony Pictures Classics, but that doesn't save it from the critics. "What if it’s not cell phones, iPods, MySpace or whatever that’s keeping the teen demographic out of movie theaters? What if, instead, it’s the movies’ endless reduction of their complex, muddled and — gasp! — occasionally enjoyable lives to a bunch of recycled social-problem clichés?" muses Ella... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Grime, crime and turn-of-the-century Vienna.
By Alison Willmore on 08/18/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle"Factotum": The combination of Norwegian director Bent Hamer ("Kitchen Stories"), great American raconteur of dissipation Charles Bukowski and Matt Dillon is apparently a potent one; LA Weekly's Scott Foundas writes that "it's the closest any film has come, outside of the Bukowski-scripted Barfly, to distilling the author's world of lonely barrooms at noon, $500 cars, and desperate men and women who cling to each other less out of love than out of terror of loneliness." He likes Dillon's performance as the author's alter-ego Henry Chinaski, as does Manohla Dargis at the New York Times, who thinks that "[l]ike the... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Half Nelsoned.
By Alison Willmore on 08/11/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleAnother week, another avalanche of releases. Among the others opening this week (but not included in this round-up) are Svankmajer's "Lunacy," "The Beales of Grey Gardens," hipster romance "Satellite" and horror film "Calvaire" (like "Deliverance," except with bestiality and Belgians). + "Half Nelson": Ryan Fleck's feature debut, an expanded version of his 2004 short "Gowanus, Brooklyn" (with a hotter, famouser lead), was one of the big Sundance buzz films. The folks at Reverse Shot are a little kinder to it than they have been to previous Sundance releases — Michael Koresky calls it "an admirably dark American independent of the... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Little Miss Woody Allen.
By Alison Willmore on 07/28/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleWe tried to write this entry multiple times, but are really too tired to wrangle anything today. Please accept this summary instead: "Scoop": Bleah. "Little Miss Sunshine": Meh to yeah. Honestly? We're going to "Miami Vice" this weekend. And we're going to love it. Back Monday. MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Clerks II." And there's a lady. In the water. Also, "Shadowboxer."
By Alison Willmore on 07/21/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleIt's been quite an inane week here at The IFC Blog; we blame it on this week's releases, as it is, after all, the week of the Crazy. We'd planned to catch "Shadowboxer" (because Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr. is the most awesomely strange romantic pairing we're ever come across) but couldn't make the screening, so no reviews from us either. Well, we'd advise you to skip "Azumi" — even with Jo Odagiri in makeup twirling a rose, it's not that fun. + "Clerks II": Kevin Smith's follow-up to the 1994 film that made him famous is apparently... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Meanwhile, back at the France.
By Alison Willmore on 07/14/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleIt's Bastille Day! Of the three big-name French films opening today, we like "Time to Leave," are lukewarm on "Changing Times" and loathed "Gabrielle" when we saw it at the New York Film Festival last year. Also opening are William H. Macy-does-Mamet "Edmond," Edward Burns remaking (an apparently somewhat better version of) the same movie he always does in "The Groomsmen," and indie sex comedy "The OH in Ohio," with the unexpectedly high-end cast of Parker Posey, Paul Rudd and Marissa Cooper...er, Mischa Barton. + "Gabrielle": Everyone (except us) apparently loves Patrice Chéreau's adaptation of Joseph Conrad novella "The... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "A Scanner Darkly," "Heading South."
By Alison Willmore on 07/07/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "A Scanner Darkly": New York's David Edelstein writes that "It’s terribly frustrating when one’s Dick is at arm’s length" — ba-dum ching! In his lukewarm review of Richard Linklater's latest, he calls the film "static and remote." Meanwhile, Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, the New York Times' Manohla Dargis, and the Village Voice's J. Hoberman all like the film to varying degrees. O'Hehir calls it "among the darkest and loveliest movies you'll see this year," and calls it "a strange brew that I found as full of passion, humor and tragedy as any so-called realistic film I've seen all year."... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Jerri Blank did.
By Alison Willmore on 06/30/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleEven for a long weekend, this one's packed — here in New York, beyond the films below, we count at least six other indie openings, including Takashi Miike's "The Great Yokai War," Iraq doc "The Blood of My Brother," Bollywood superhero flick "Krrish," pedophilia (!) comedy "Say Uncle," IFC's own arty bull riding doc "Rank" and Kyle Henry's Independent Spirit Award nominee "Room"...and all of these are in addition to "The Devil Wears Prada" and "Superman Returns." It's both exhilarating and frustrating — more movies (and many of them worth seeing), it seems, then there are people to see them.... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Gitmo, 9/11 and SoCal skate rats.
By Alison Willmore on 06/23/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Road to Guantanamo": It's almost impossible to look at Michael Winterbottom's latest as a film to like or dislike (or in any sense enjoy), but the highly charged hybrid doc in certainly interesting. Our beloved Armond White snarls "This whacked-out piece of anti-American propaganda, pretending Human Rights rhetoric, is a Weapon of Crass misInstruction" and goes onto to grumble that if Winterbottom has "come down to pardoning the Taliban regime just for narrative fodder, then it's time he folded up his digicam." At the Village Voice, J. Hoberman finds the film "effectively grueling," and writes (with apparent... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: We didn't even like you BEFORE you sold out edition.
By Alison Willmore on 06/16/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleThere are plenty of probably worthwhile indies bouncing around the theaters this week: "Wordplay," "Lower City," "Loverboy"...feh. We're weary and just not up to an array of tasteful or tastefully erotic indies. So here are some thrown-together quotes regarding the two films opening this weekend that, as our colleague Matt Singer points out, are both the work of young directors who made splashy indie debuts and followed them up by leaping immediately into the Hollywood big kids pool, giving everyone a chance to rag on how they weren't that great to begin with. + "Nacho Libre": LA Weekly's Scott Foundas: "Like... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Who's your "Prairie Home Companion" now, bitch?
By Alison Willmore on 06/09/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleSorry. Somehow it seemed necessary. + "A Prairie Home Companion": We haven't has a chance to see Robert Altman's latest yet, but we probably will, as by most accounts it's a joy. It inspires Roger Ebert to drippiness and the quoting of F. Scott Fitzgerald: "There is so much of the ghost of Scott Fitzgerald hovering in the shadows of this movie that at the end I quoted to myself the closing words of 'The Great Gatsby.' I'm sure you remember them, so let's say them together: And so we beat on, boats against the current, drawn back ceaselessly into... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "The War Tapes," "The Cult of the Suicide Bomber," "District 13."
By Alison Willmore on 06/02/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle"The War Tapes": Deborah Scranton's guardsmen-shot documentary, which won the Best Documentary prize at Tribeca, provokes reactions ranging from impressed to frustrated. At the New York Times, A.O. Scott's in the first camp, writing thatWhatever your opinion of the war — and however it has changed over the years — this movie is sure to challenge your thinking and disturb your composure. It provides no reassurance, no euphemism, no closure. Given the subject and the circumstances, how could it?Michael Atkinson at the Village Voice is startlingly dismissive: "[As] a piece of sociopolitical culture with context and ramifications of its... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Er...what?
By Alison Willmore on 05/26/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleSave "An Inconvenient Truth," a bit quiet this weekend on the film front. Oh, and there's some comic book movie. + "Cavite": Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon's uberindie (see this interview with them for more, they're pretty amazing) gets a tiny release in New York and LA and acclaim from all sides. At LA Weekly, some uncredited person (Ella Taylor? Scott Foundas?) writes that it's "nearly as taut from a political standpoint as it is from a narrative one." Dennis Lim at the Village Voice observes that "Despite its indie ingenuity, 'Cavite' is a blockbuster at heart," but that... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Twelve and Holding," "The King."
By Alison Willmore on 05/19/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Twelve and Holding": "L.I.E."'s Michael Cuesta returns with another shocking look at teenage suburban life as — Armond White writes in the NY Press, he has "what Truffaut called an 'idée fixe.' He's stuck on recreating adolescent trauma, examining that period when sex and social rules don't come together satisfactorily." White, who liked "L.I.E.", is not impressed by "Twelve and Holding," which he believes "offers no revelation." Dennis Lim at the Village Voice goes further: "[S]triking in both its confidence and its incoherence...Cuesta's new poisoned valentine to adolescence, a tragicomedy of pubertal acting out, is likewise premised on... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "The Promise," "The Proposition," and "Art School Confidential."
By Alison Willmore on 05/05/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Promise": We'd been forewarned about Armond White's review of Chen Kaige's pricey fantasy epic. But still!With "The Promise," Chen Kaige joins cinema’s archetypal visionaries from Murnau to Kurosawa, Bertolucci to Boorman. He’s made an action movie rich with adult meaning and paradox—as when the Princess pauses and kisses the General, a kiss that gives orgasmic rest. Chen commits to genre refinement; he shows exactly what you need to see with no excess—but with sudden shifts where dreamlike events take on a realism of supernal clarity. "The Promise" is a corrective to the HK/Peter Jackson trend where action... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "American Dreamz" and "Somersault."
By Alison Willmore on 04/21/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleNo new reviews from us this week — we ain't seen nothin'. + "American Dreamz": Roger Ebert ledes with "'American Dreamz' is a comedy, not a satire. We have that on the authority of its writer-director, Paul Weitz, who told Variety: 'Satire is what closes on Saturday night. So it's a comedy.' Actually, it's a satire. Its comedy is only fairly funny, but its satire is mean, tending toward vicious." Ebert, who gives the film three stars out of four, is one of the few impressed by Weitz's satirical talents — Salon's Stephanie Zacharek (who was also a big fan... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Hard Candy," "Kinky Boots," and "The Notorious Bettie Page."
By Alison Willmore on 04/14/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleIt's a weekend of naughty titles attached to not-so-naughty films. + "Hard Candy": "Not to sound like Michael Medved here, but really: Isn't there a statute of limitations for the rape-revenge genre?" wonders Rob Nelson at the Village Voice, who finds it half bemusingly guilty pleasure and half "pure torture—to watch, some will say." In the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas suggests David Slade's film is somewhere between the traditions of "Death and the Maiden" and "Funny Games," and writes that, despite lacking the sense of humanity of those films:[L]ike its eponymous confection, the movie gets lodged in your throat and... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Friends with Money," "4," "On A Clear Day."
By Alison Willmore on 04/07/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Friends With Money": Despite reviews running from warm to lukecold on Nicole Holofcener's latest, no one is particularly excited about it, perhaps because hers are not the type of films one gets all giddy standing in line for. She is "a first-rate portraitist and something of a miniaturist," Manohla Dargis writes in the New York Times in one of the more fond reviews, though she does suggest that it is "greatly appealing if not especially adventurous, either for its director or for her admirers." In LA Weekly, Ella Taylor muses that "if it lacks the bitchy, enraged vitality... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: A Spike Lee sublet? And "L'Enfant."
By Alison Willmore on 03/24/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleOur week's review (it's been a while). for "Stoned," is here. + "Inside Man": For while now, the mere flicker of Spike Lee's name across the opening scenes of a film has been enough to set people's teeth on edge...so straightforward crime caper "Inside Man" might be Lee's "Match Point" moment for the way most critics are calling it both great and completely lacking the bludgeoning sensibilities we've come to associate with Lee as a director. "Mr. Lee may have missed his calling (one of them, anyway) as a studio hire," muses Manohla Dargis at the New York Times, who... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Two pre-Oscar docs.
By Alison Willmore on 03/03/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Our Brand Is Crisis": "Call it spin-meisters abroad," says the Village Voice's J. Hoberman of Rachel Boynton's highly praised documentary about American political consultants hired by Bolivian presidential candidate Gonzalo "Goni" Sánchez de Lozada. Hoberman points out the film is a kind of sequel to 1993's "The War Room," not the least because it features an appearance by James Carville — about which David Edelstein at New York writes: "It's hard to know whether to marvel or weep when James Carville goes into his Bill Clinton–meets–Looney Tunes act...the context is so morally topsy-turvy." Edelstein marvels at the "extraordinary... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Tsotsi" and that "Unknown White Male."
By Alison Willmore on 02/24/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Tsotsi": Our own review is here — basically, we think this is half of a good movie. Reviews are good-to-mixed when it comes to Gavin Hood's Oscar-nominated film about the redemption of a Johannesburg street thug who unintentionally kidnaps a baby — it's tough to bash a film that so clearly wears its heart on its battered leather jacket sleeve. But most acknowledge the film's narrative is hardly a new one. Jessica Winter at the Village Voice sums it up: "tough guy humanized by a cute kid." She also points out that Hood "isn't inoculated [oof] against cliché;... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Battle In Heaven," "Night Watch."
By Alison Willmore on 02/17/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleWe've got a wicked, wicked headache, sorry if this is less than, you know, in English. + "Battle In Heaven": The general thought seems to be that director Carlos Reygadas is tremendously gifted, but that his already infamous second film doesn't come together. That's not a blowjob joke. Several critics acknowledge that, for all this film is being heatedly discussed, no one in the non-film-geek world will ever care. Andrew O'Hehir at Salon:Reygadas is already a famous figure within the tiny, insular world of international art film, which means both that a fair number of smart if unbelievably pretentious people... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "London" calling.
By Alison Willmore on 02/10/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "London": You could practically hear critics around the country cracking their knuckles and doing a few preparatory neck rolls before sitting down to eviscerate Hunter Richards' Bret Easton Ellisesque directorial debut, which stars Jessica Biel, Chris "Flame On" Evans, Jason Statham and a cocaine-dusted bathroom. You know it's bad when even Roger Ebert kicks off with snark:At one point in "London," a Japanese experiment is described. Scientists place containers of white rice in two different rooms. One container is praised. Nice rice. Beautiful rice. The other container is insulted. Ugly rice. Bad rice. At the end of a... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: We heart race relations!
By Alison Willmore on 02/03/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada": Praise always seems less impressive in the DV dullness of January and February than it does in the breathless celluloid splendor of December, and so, despite much critical love here for Tommy Lee Jones' directorial demi-debut, it already has an air of fading from the screens to it (perhaps because it lurks in the shadows of a certain other prominent cowboy film) Those who are fondest: Manohla Dargis, Roger Ebert (feh), the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum and the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas (who muses that the film "may not be a love... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Toil and trouble.
By Alison Willmore on 01/27/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Bubble": Time will tell if "Bubble"'s day-and-date theater/TV/DVD release is as paradigm-rumbling as some of the breathless news coverage would have us believe, but Steven Soderbergh's latest effort, shot on HD on the cheap with all non-professional actors, is generating interesting (if mixed), reviews on its own. It's "[e]asier to admire than love," says Manohla Dargis, a note several other critics sound: Matt Zoller Seitz at the New York Press calls it [l]ike a lot of Soderbergh's recent work...a loose-limbed but fairly theoretical filmmaking experiment; as such, it's more interesting to talk about than to sit through." Seitz, as... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Looking for comedy in the Muslim world and reunified Germany.
By Alison Willmore on 01/20/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World": We're so fantastically not in the mood for an Albert Brooks comedy right now (we could really go for settling in with a bottle of whiskey and some film, any film, dedicated to people being violent at each other), and the critical reception to this one is almost universally lukewarm and centered on analyzing Brooks' career-long persona, so we'll go pullquote-style: David Edelstein at New York: "These days, Brooks wants to humiliate himself before anyone else can, and he’s making a fetish of it, devoting so much energy to demonstrating what a... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Then again, maybe not...
By Alison Willmore on 01/13/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangleJanuary has yet to disappoint as one of the most disappointing months for film (or, rather, simply half-hearted, in a very post-blackout drunk coitus disinterested breakfast conversation fashion). There aren't any particular releases worth focusing on this week, so we thought we'd continue to just meander through: The New York Times' Manohla Dargis and Salon's Stephanie Zacharek express variations on the same sentiment in their respective reviews of "Tristan & Isolde" and "Last Holiday," something along the lines of "When did every movie get saddled with the obligation to break new ground?" (Maybe, unfair an expectation as it is, around... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: The Fateless Hostel.
By Alison Willmore on 01/06/2006
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Fateless": As Salon's Andrew O'Hehir points out, "There have been so many cinematic presentations of the Holocaust that, with the event itself receding beyond the reach of living memory, it's in danger of becoming historical porn, an exotic atrocity we consume over and over again for increasingly dubious reasons." Nevertheless, nothing but praise as yet for Hungarian cinematographer-turned-director Lajos Koltai's film, which rallies us once more to return to those celluloid-friendly days of genocide. O'Hehir, who also makes a halfhearted attempt to find similarities between "Fateless" and the other film he covers this week, "Hostel," flips for the film's... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Brokeback.
By Alison Willmore on 12/09/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangleWooo...it has been a long week for us, beloveds, and as much as we liked "Brokeback Mountain" and are at least a little intrigued by "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" (which we started to round up also, then were defeated by) we feel so saturated in coverage of both films that we're left having to slap ourselves in the face to stay focused. Gay cowboys...Christ-figure fauna...all...blurring together... We're going to come at you pullquote style here, because honestly, there's nothing surprising that's being said about "Brokeback" (which is pulling in solid, if not extremely enthused reviews) that hasn't... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Walking the Line to Pluto.
By Alison Willmore on 11/18/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangleNo new long review from us this week — our NYFF review of "Breakfast on Pluto" is here. + "Walk the Line": The consensus seems to be that James Mangold's Johnny Cash biopic is good, but not great. There's near universal acclaim for leads Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon (David Denby at the New Yorker says "As I watched Phoenix sling his guitar around and gun it at the audience in Cash's shambling style, I couldn't imagine anyone better suited to play the role," while Ella Taylor at LA Weekly claims that Witherspoon "brings not just vivacity but a depth... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Let's hear it for the ladies.
By Alison Willmore on 11/11/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Ellie Parker": Scott Coffey's micro-indie was expanded from a 2001 short that starred a friend of his, the then-struggling actress Naomi Watts. It's one in a long line of "Hollywood is Hell"-type films, and several critics note it's brief nods to "Play It as It Lays," "The Day of the Locust" and "Living in Oblivion." Melissa Anderson at the Village Voice notes another film connection:[W]here this trifle fascinates most is in its connections to David Lynch's masterpiece ["Mulholland Drive"]. With the sunny, can-do attitude of Betty Elms, Ellie [Watts] dons a lavender hoopskirt to impress the dissolute Russian producers... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Jarhead," "The Dying Gaul," Greenwald takes on Wal-Mart.
By Alison Willmore on 11/04/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Jarhead": We're back to that contention of Truffaut's that there's no such thing as an anti-war film, a claim cited in several of this week's reviews of Sam Mendes' adaptation of Anthony Swofford's Gulf War memoir. Swofford himself, as other reviewers (including the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum, from whom we swiped the following) point out, says the same thing in his book:There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: The weatherman goes to three extremes, and "Paradise Now."
By Alison Willmore on 10/28/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Weather Man": We know this isn't kosher, but we loved/feared Gore Verbinski's "The Ring," more so than the Japanese original. We dunno if it was his intent, but Verbinski managed to make a horror movie so sparse and strange it was almost expressionist. Kept us up for days. He's a very interesting, if scattered, commercial director (Remember when he sprayed fake tanner on Gene Hackman and had him pretend to be ethnic in "The Mexican"? What the hell was that?), one who jumped right in to the mainstream (see "Mousehunt") without splashing around in the indie...pond (it's too... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: The shopping, the kissing, the class action lawsuit.
By Alison Willmore on 10/21/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Shopgirl": Compare and contrast: A. O. Scott's rave ("[I]t's true that none of [the characters] are perfect. From where I sit, though, the film they inhabit comes pretty close.") and Andrew O'Hehir's scathing tear-down ("[I]t's basically a dreadful film that should never have been made.") (O'Hehir is on fire with the snark this week — see him slap down the admittedly ridiculous-looking "Stay" here). We admit, we're startled by both — Anand Tucker's adaptation of Steve Martin's novella (in which Martin also stars) looked more than a little "Garden State" slick-whimsical-self-important to us (we haven't seen it), but we'd... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: "Where the Truth Lies," the "Elizabethtown" massacre of mediocity.
By Alison Willmore on 10/14/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Where the Truth Lies": Noted by at least two critics in their reviews of Atom Egoyan's latest (which, as you may recall. is being released unrated here in the US after being deemed too thrusty for an R): Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) are stand-ins for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis; Alison Lohman's none-so-great as the journalist looking into the former comedic duo's past; the film has a running "Alice in Wonderland" motif; and, most importantly, Rupert Holmes, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, also wrote the 1979 single "Escape (The... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Proof that the Corpse Thumbsucker is HellBent for Illumination.
By Alison Willmore on 09/16/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangleSo. Many. Releases! If this is terse, don't take it personally. + "Proof": It's possible this stodgy-looking Miramax play-adaptation was made just for Anthony Lane to review. He utterly enjoys himself with all kinds of silliness (he calls Anthony Hopkins' character "a math wizard of Dumbledore proportions"). A particularly worthy selection:Claire [Hope Davis] flies in from New York, where, unlike Catherine [Gwyneth Paltrow], she has (boo!) a job, and (hiss!) a fiancé, and (avaunt thee, Satan!) nice clothes. She despairs of her lank-haired, wonky sibling, and they soon lock antlers over the vexed question of jojoba conditioner. Claire can't even... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: The Unfinished Emily Rose.
By Alison Willmore on 09/09/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "An Unfinished Life": Roger Ebert gets all meta while reviewing Lasse Hallström's latest:The typical review of "An Unfinished Life" will mention that it was kept on the shelf at Miramax for two years, and is now being released as part of the farewell flood of leftover product produced by the Weinstein brothers. It will say that Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman are trying to be Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman. It will have no respect for Jennifer Lopez, because she is going through a period right now when nobody is satisfied with anything she does. These reviews will be... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Grimm brothers, gay brothers.
By Alison Willmore on 08/26/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Brothers Grimm": "I'm the only earthling besides Lem Dobbs's mother who still likes 'Kafka,' and for me Terry Gilliam's new windup toy 'The Brothers Grimm' is a daffy, genre-hash gambol, descendant of the Hammer Film school (if those B sides had ever been made with money and talent)," trumpets Michael Atkinson, who's also the only one in our regular batch of critics who cares for the film at all. Not that anyone hates it, per se...in fact, most try very hard to be charitable about director Gilliam's first theatrical effort in seven years to actually make it, completed,... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Red-Eyed Sympathy.
By Alison Willmore on 08/19/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance": "'Vengeance will never be mistaken for 'Broadcast News,' and it's guaranteed to prompt the usual style-over-substance and exploitation-posing-as-art complaints,'" drawls Matt Zoller Seitz of this first installment of Park Chan-wook's revenge trilogy ("Oldboy," the second film, was released first here in the US). And he's right, and he and La Manohla make an interesting point/counterpoint on the subject. Ms. Dargis devoted much of her "Oldboy" review to this topic:The fact that ''Oldboy'' is embraced by some cinephiles is symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism (it's all good) and... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Grizzly Persuasion.
By Alison Willmore on 08/12/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Grizzly Man": "Herzog's first authentic found-footage movie," Michael Atkinson calls it, and for the most part critics are enraptured by the director's portrait of Timothy Treadwell, a man who for 12 and a half seasons lived in alarming proximity to the grizzlies in Alaska's Katmai National Park, until he and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by one of them. This is the greatest of Werner Herzog's recent spate of documentaries, which have been trickling out over the past year and include "The White Diamond" and "The Wheel of Time." Treadwell is the typical Herzog figure (many mention "Fitzcarraldo"):... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Broken Flowers in 2046.
By Alison Willmore on 08/05/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "2046": At last! Wong Kar Wai's ages-in-the-making sequel to his beloved 2000 film "In the Mood for Love" (a fact everyone dances around, feeling the need to bracket the term in quotation marks or preface it with "unofficial": it's very clearly a sequel, people) makes its voluptuous way into limited release today. Michael Atkinson and Manohla Dargis are fondest: La Manohla calls it an "unqualified triumph" and notes it's much improved from the yet-unfinished version that premiered at Cannes in 2004. Atkinson finds that the film's power lies in its still-living state, in the sense that it has only... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Aristocratakitani.
By Alison Willmore on 07/29/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "The Aristocrats": Everyone loves Paul Provenza's dirty-mouthed doc, though they're quick to throw around some high-falutin' labels: David Edelstein refers to it as "practically a classical symphony, with a theme, variations, variations that turn the theme inside out, and a coda," while to A. O. Scott it's "an essay film, a work of painstaking and penetrating scholarship, and, as such, one of the most original and rigorous pieces of criticism in any medium I have encountered in quite some time" (he then points out it's also "possibly the filthiest, vilest, most extravagantly obscene documentary ever made"). Stephanie Zacharek finds... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: 9 Songs about the Last Days of Hustling & Flowing.
By Alison Willmore on 07/22/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangleUnsimulated sex, suicide and prostitution — just another week in indie film. And damn right!+ "9 Songs": Michael Winterbottom's real sex, fake (we presume) drugs, and real rock and roll finally slinks its 69 controversial minutes onto select screens. And the question here seem to be less "Is it porn or is it art?", as Kristi Mitsuda poses at indieWIRE, and more whether Winterbottom's reduction of a love story to its purely physical elements provokes an astonishing sense of intimacy or emotional detachment. Matt Zoller Seitz:It will be fun to watch critics pretend to be loftily bemused, and not the... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Charlie and the Happy Endings Factory.
By Alison Willmore on 07/15/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory": Was 1971's "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory" a bad movie? We've never really comprehended it in terms of quality — watching and rewatching it at an impressionable young age, certain striking scenes hovered in our memory, and it wasn't until years later that we actually understood them in the context of some narrative. We only bring it up because several critics take Tim Burton's remake as an opportunity to knock Mel Stuart's version, which we suppose we'd always mentally shelved as an untouchable classic. Oh, ♥Gene Wilder.♥ Anyway, everyone seems to find "Charlie"... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Bewitching the Dead, Yes!
By Alison Willmore on 06/24/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ Yes: Despite our fears that many critics would think it was just hilarious to review Sally Potter's film in the rhyming iambic pentameter in which its written, only one ventures that far. And it's Anthony Lane, of course:You may get off on this enthralling stuff,But after half an hour I’d had enough.He actually does quite a good job of it, and seems to thoroughly enjoy pretending he's the love child of Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde (now there's a grand romantic pairing for you). Anyway, he doesn't buy the verse gimmick, finds the film padded, and while he admires... MORE »
Last week's critic wrangle: Delayed reaction.
By Alison Willmore on 06/20/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangleIt's been a while since we've done one of these (we keep meaning to and then the day slips away from us — and were intimidated by the very thought of trying to digest all of those "Batman Begins" reviews into a paragraph), but once again Armond White summons us to back.+ "Me and You and Everyone We Know": We loved this film, and it got a warm to ecstatic critical reception this past weekend, opening in New York. That being said, we could easily see how someone wouldn't like it. It flirts with preciousness, and though, save for one... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle: Cinderella Pants.
By Alison Willmore on 06/03/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Cinderella Man": A subtle film, this is not. "Schmaltz" and its kindlier brother, "sentimentality," seems to be the operative words here. Roger Ebert says "There is a moment early in "Cinderella Man" when we see Russell Crowe in the boxing ring, filled with cocky self-confidence, and I thought I knew what direction the story would take. I could not have been more mistaken." He's the only one even remotely surprised by any of the plot twists in this, by all accounts, archetypal Ron Howard Uplifting Movie. He also likes it the best.How much others liked "Cinderella Man" hinges on... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle.
By Alison Willmore on 05/13/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle+ "Kings and Queen": By all accounts, Arnaud Desplechin's latest is the film to see this weekend. Various critics are gurgling in cinephile bliss over it, most notably Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, who devotes the majority of his monthly "Beyond the Multiplex" column to "Kings," pleading:For God's sake, see this one. When I tell you that it's a French movie that's 150 minutes long -- well, let's face it, your heart sinks. But I was so wrapped up in its world of love and betrayal and madness, its story of a pampered belle and a man crumbling into insanity in a... MORE »
The week's critic wrangle.
By Alison Willmore on 05/06/2005
Filed under: Critic wrangle"Kingdom of Heaven": An odd cultural artifact, if not a great movie, most of the critics agree. As La Manohla puts it, the film is "an ostensibly fair-minded, even-handed account of one of the least fair-minded, even-handed chapters in human history." The biggest problem, everyone agrees, it that Ridley Scott wants to have the film be a message about the futility of religiously-fueled warfare, while all the lusciously filmed, endless, bloody battles seem to say, as Stephanie Zacharek puts it, "But gosh, doesn't it look cool?" No one is impressed by darling Orlando; the nicest anyone has to say about... MORE »
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