It seems strange that it’s taken this long for Claire Denis and Isabelle Huppert to work together on a film, but whatever the reason, it was worth the wait. Denis’s “White Material,” featuring the legendary actress as a white African farmer who insists on staying in her home even though her war-torn country is descending…
This interview originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Infamous in Britain for his shows “The Day Today” (which helped launch the career of Steve Coogan) and “Brass Eye,” British comedy legend Chris Morris is generally regarded as something of a recluse, and rarely gives interviews. Not that he’s…
Like all of Frederick Wiseman’s films, his latest has a title that seems to say it all: “Boxing Gym” is basically an hour-and-a-half of sights and sounds from an Austin area boxing gym. As usual, though, there’s more going on here. In presenting glimpses of different trainees – be they kids enjoying a fun sport,…
Presumably, Werner Herzog needs no introduction. Like an atmospheric phenomenon or a law of physics, the German filmmaker has been some kind of constant for over more than four decades of world cinema. That he continues to be a major presence in the world of film — churning out both documentaries and narrative features with…
It would have been easy for Vincent Cassel to become a glamorous movie star early on in life — as the talented son of the French actor Jean-Pierre Cassel, he could have just waited for the leading man roles to come to him. “There was a path for me early on,” says the 43-year-old actor.…
Christoph Waltz may have won the Oscar and Michael Fassbender may have nailed the dry British accent, but to many, the true breakthrough performance of last year’s “Inglourious Basterds” belonged to Mélanie Laurent, who as the beautiful but deadly Shosanna Dreyfus held that film’s revenge narrative together with her hypnotically vengeful blue eyes. Now, the…
The characters in Nicolas Winding Refn’s films remind one of the famous tale of the scorpion and frog. They’re trapped by compulsive behavior, often against their better natures. A small-time drug dealer in “Pusher” (1996), the director’s breakthrough debut, seems to go further and further into debt the more he tries to pay back a…
Mia Hansen-Løve may initially seem like an odd person to make a film about the death of a film producer. Although the young actress-cum-director has been intimately involved in the world of cinema since her appearance at the age of 18 in director Olivier Assayas’s “Late August, Early September” (1998) (she even wrote for the…
Jesse Eisenberg has cultivated such a distinct onscreen persona over the years — across films as diverse as “Roger Dodger,” “Adventureland,” and “The Squid and the Whale” — that it’s tempting to view each film as the latest entry in a franchise. Yes, the young actor (who, despite often getting cast as a teen, is…
Daniel Barber’s “Harry Brown” will provoke justifiable comparisons to 2008′s surprise hit “Gran Torino” — geezer with a past decides to clean his neighborhood of punks — but in some ways, it feels closer to that winter’s other surprise hit “Taken” — likable actor kills legions of faceless hoods. Michael Caine is the geezer in…
For better or worse, we live in the age of the action homage, in which popular filmmakers clutch their self-awareness like a talisman against their fears of the unknown — whether manifested through the sublime referentiality of “Inglourious Basterds” or the neurotic mimicry of “Watchmen.” What to make, then, of a film like Kim Ji-woon’s…
It’s no surprise to learn that Argentine director Juan José Campanella, whose “The Secret in Their Eyes” shocked the world by snatching the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar right out from under the expectant noses of Michael Haneke and Jacques Audiard earlier this year, has done some directing for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,”…
Originality can be overrated. Nash Edgerton‘s Aussie thriller “The Square” doesn’t really have an original bone in its body, and I’m not sure it needs to. It belongs to that well-worn noir subgenre of adulterous lovers attempting to make a break for it — “Blood Simple” is an obvious influence — but Edgerton eschews the…
Perhaps one of the most unusual sights of the Sundance Film Festival was seeing British comedy legend Chris Morris walking around and doing Q&As after screenings of his “jihadi comedy” “Four Lions.” Infamous in Britain for his shows “The Day Today” (which helped launch the career of Steve Coogan) and “Brass Eye,” Morris is generally…
Reviewed at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Jeffrey Blitz walks a deceptively fine line in “Lucky,” a film that looks at the effects of winning the lottery on a variety of individuals and families. It would be easy – too easy — to screw this up. The lottery, with its false hope and promise of…
Reviewed at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. “He does for the living what Weegee did for the dead” is how one talking head in Leon Gast’s “Smash His Camera” explains Ron Galella, the notorious ur-paparazzo famous both for his striking candids of celebrities across the decades and his relentless pursuit of his glamorous quarries. It’s…
Reviewed at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. While a variety of films from “Up in the Air” to “The International” have found an icy beauty in the clean lines and empty spaces of modern corporate life, there’s a strange, quiet pall cast over the blank offices and boardrooms that make up the landscape of “The…
