Darren Aronofsky may have young hipster’s cred, established with his fast-cut, technically daring early features “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream.” But look closely and you’ll see a purveyor of old-fashioned melodramas. While the Brooklyn-born director often shows a surface fascination with the frazzled postmodern condition, à la the films of far chillier contemporaries such…
As David Lynch knows, there’s nothing scarier than white picket fences, old-fashioned red fire engines and a grandfatherly figure hosing down a manicured green lawn. Hidden behind his innocuous vision of Americana lies an insidious layer of viciousness, perversity and oppression. On the eve of mid-term elections, the opening of Lynch’s 1986 classic “Blue Velvet”…
With the election season upon us, and economic tussles in Washington reaching fever pitch, an onslaught of movies addressing America’s #1 political issue are about to hit theaters. Between now and voting day, at least five movies, both documentary and fiction, take up the subject of the global economic collapse, examining its roots, causes and…
The year’s most successful foreign film isn’t from Pedro Almodóvar, doesn’t include martial arts fighting and isn’t distributed by Miramax or Sony Pictures Classics. It didn’t even play at a major international film festival like Cannes or Toronto. Reviews were generally favorable, but by no means raves; and with no foreign stars and a running…
Americans soldiers, weighted down with backpacks and machine guns, rush up a hill in the remote mountains of Afghanistan. We follow them closely through the underbrush as bullets whiz past their heads, then voices call out — a man is down, one of theirs. A grieving soldier goes into shock, breathing heavily, on the verge…
Reviewed at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Beneath all the swift camerawork and rapid editing, Alejandro González Iñárritu remains a sentimentalist. In his latest, “Biutiful,” a stylized paean to a devoted father in the slums of Barcelona, the Mexican director once again plays up the melodramatics — with mixed results. Dedicated to his own father,…
Reviewed at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. “It’s nuttier than squirrel shit,” says college student Stella (Haley Bennett) at one point in Gregg Araki’s latest film, “Kaboom,” a back-to-his-roots, candy-colored cult thriller that is best described, in a similar vein, as “totally fucked up.” Araki’s 1994 movie of that same name as well as the…
Reviewed at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Woody Allen has preempted criticism of his latest breezy exercise in romantic neurosis by opening and closing his film by evoking Shakespeare’s famous line: “It is a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” While that claim may be facetious — Allen returns here to familiar territory…
Reviewed at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you?” asks a counselor, Gerri (Ruth Sheen), to an older woman who has been having trouble sleeping. “One,” the aggrieved woman (Imelda Staunton) answers with muted fury. The scene works as a prologue of sorts to British director…
Reviewed at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. For at least its first half, Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” — the sequel to his 1987 original — may be the cinema’s best dramatization of the 2008 financial meltdown. With its rapidly cut split-screens and downward spiraling electronic numbers reflecting on the panicked face of…
“I had reservations about making art a business,” the famous art collector Mary Boone once said. “But I got over it.” Such is the tension within all artistic industries — film, painting, theater or music, the idea of selling-out dogs them all. Are the high prices that paintings go for at Sotheby’s or films sell…
The high altitudes of Park City, UT — home to the Sundance Film Festival — have been known to cause dehydration, insomnia and an overappreciation of certain independent movies. What sparks standing ovations and multi-million dollar acquisitions in the rarefied confines of the snowbound town doesn’t always carry over into the outside world. For every…
Film serials go back to the earliest days of cinema — think “Perils of Pauline” cliffhangers or the exploits of French criminal mastermind “Fantômas,” unspooling in theaters in weekly installments. More recently, a new kind of serial cinema has emerged. Less reminiscent of those silent movies or the Hollywood franchises of Harry Potter or James…
God didn’t make Rambo; I made him! In the ’80s, Americans found a new brand of movie hero that corresponded precisely with Reagan-era conservative values. Ripped, vengeful and violent, action stars like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson and a beefed-up Bruce Willis helped reestablish myths of rugged individualism, militarism and machismo through an awesome…
In 1989, Spike Lee picked up a trashcan and hurled it into the front window of Sal’s Pizzeria, stirring chaos in Bed-Stuy and sending movie audiences into a tizzy about race relations in America. That same year, Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma were reopening heated debates about Vietnam (“Born on the Fourth of July,”…
Serious African-American cinema scarcely exists. It arrives in fits and sputters, in the occasional legends (Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks), outliers (Charles Burnett, Julie Dash) or mavericks (Spike Lee). But demanding cinema based around the black experience are largely absent from American screens, displaced by gangstas, guns and masquerading comedians in drag or fat suits…
Barring some epic year-end bombshell, Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist” is sure to walk away with the designation of year’s most provocative movie — with its sadomasochistic sex, penis smashing and spontaneous clitorectomy, it rivals Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 cinema scandal “In the Realm of the Senses” in its efforts to shock and offend. It’s a useful…
Every year, critics come up with their lists of the top ten films of the past 12 months. Ideally an eclectic mix of arthouse fare, Hollywood auteurs and the occasional wild card (say, last year’s appearance of Ben Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder”), these decalogues of cinephilia tend to be capricious, political and painstakingly strategized for maximum…
Last week, America’s indie film community took a long, hard look at its precarious state. After industry pros flew back home from the Toronto International Film Festival — heads throbbing from too many drinks, not enough sleep and the lackluster marketplace, where few films were bought and sold — many headed straight to the IFP’s…
The way we watch movies is changing. And no one knows how, in the not so distant future, cinema’s going to be consumed — especially those independent and art films that are increasingly unloved by the Hollywood distribution system. Multiplexes may not be the place for defiantly indie cinema, but are iPods, Xboxes, laptops and…
Lucrecia Martel’s hallucinatory new film “The Headless Woman” could just as well be called “The Hazy Woman.” While the film’s protagonist, the middle-aged Vero, appears headless, literally, in several images — with the frame cutting her off at the neck — she’s also shown walking around in a daze, with blurry cinematography providing a visual…
By Anthony Kaufman IFC News [Photo: Left, Steve Zahn and Christian Bale in "Rescue Dawn"; below, Werner Herzog, MGM 2007] Werner Herzog: True American patriot? Fans of the New German Cinema maverick may not associate the man behind “Aguirre, Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo” and “Nosferatu” with tales of U.S. military heroism overseas, but “Rescue Dawn,”…
