Track premiere: Good Old War “It Hurts Every Time”
Lost Memories: Our 10 favorite amnesia movies
Call-In Commentary: Watch the “Rampart” trailer with writer-director Oren Moverman
The rise of the film critic filmmaker
I don’t know about you, but when I hear the name “Godzilla,” certain images come to mind. I see a dude in a rubber lizard suit stomping around a Papier-mâché city. I see Japanese men and women pointing at the sky in terror while unaccented English springs awkwardly and unconvincingly from their lips. I see…
Approaching 70 years of age, Michael Haneke is one of the best we’ve got, a filmmaker you wait for to save any given year in the last decade from banality, sloppiness and forgettability. His run since the turn of the century (excluding, I think, the unnecessary 2007 American remake of the nastily high-handed “Funny Games”)…
It’s not difficult to let yourself get carried away by full-bore dystopian satires like “Death Race 2000″ (1975), for a landfill full of reasons. Two immediately pop into mind: on one hand, unsavory poppycock like Roger Corman and Paul Bartel’s infamous film make plain the simple fact that science fiction, when it’s done properly, isn’t…
There’s something unearthly and hilarious, all too familiar and vividly unhuman, about caricatured claymation when it’s done well, and that qualmy, hypnotizing something oozes out of Adam Elliot’s “Mary and Max” like a ruptured yolk. Elliott, an Oscar winner for animated shorts, is easily the peer of the Aardman herd, and his textures and visual…
Movies are Saturday night-wasting entertainment and they’re transcendent mega-art, but they’re also history, living tissues of the past that overpower any other medium we have for preserving experience and retaining cultural memory. This is no small matter, despite the relatively slight influence that film’s historical potential has in the consumer marketplace, which is virtually defined…
As close to a gritty American New Wave film as a 2008 Chilean movie is likely to get, Pablo Larraín’s “Tony Manero” plays like equal parts “Taxi Driver,” “Scarecrow,” “Badlands” and “Saturday Night Fever,” which is no coincidence, as it’s set in 1978 and the protagonist — a short, glowering 50-ish crook living in Santiago…
We live in a strange day and age, when the very idea of a filmmaker apostate rebelling against the status quo of mainstream cinema strikes us as unattractive or even silly. Not since the ’50s has cinema as we see it in the United States been so conformist. Sure, Tarantino and Kaufman and a handful…
Oscar-nominated if underpraised while in theaters, Oren Moverman’s “The Messenger” is by far the most mature and moving film made yet about the Iraqi invasion, even if Iraqis themselves don’t even make an appearance as figures mentioned in battle stories. It’s a telling, ethically vibrant film, and for Americans to manage such a thing while…
New waves come and new waves go, but they can also linger on in the careers of filmmakeres as they spiral out and become individuals. The Romanian New Wave that began to break only five or so years ago seems to have already dissipated — only Corneliu Porumboiu’s “Police, Adjective” has emerged in the last…
You know where you are right away with “Tokyo Sonata” — Kiyoshi Kurosawa-ville, a suburb of Japanese cinema that’s commonly plagued by secret chaotic pressure, bubbling to the surface and causing cracks in the pavement. Here, it’s a storm wind blowing in from off-camera, whisking a wide sheet of newspaper off a table and floating…
Fanatically eclectic as he is, Ang Lee seems destined to eventually make a Judd Apatow raunch comedy, simply because he hasn’t made one yet. You name it: sci-fi comic book, wuxia pian, “Classics Illustrated” costume romance, gritty bromance indie, earnest family schmaltz, woozy rock musical (sort of), and oh yeah, a war film, easily the…
Just as most intelligent critics already said last year, the kind that know their Wong from their Bong and can find their Warhol with both hands, Claire Denis’ “35 Shots of Rum” is a lovely, ruminative, impressionistic, elusive, sensitive beaut, rich in the director’s signature brand of elliptical hodgepodge and brimming with the-state-of-us-now immediacy. The…
Once upon a time, one of the best film critics in any language, a Frenchman named Serge Daney, found himself at 17 inspired toward his vocation by a single line of writing — about a film he’d never seen, and would never see. The film was Gillo Pontecorvo’s “Kapò” (1959), and the first reviewer, the…
There was a day when to love movies meant a thirst for the full century’s worth of the form and loving all of its timeline’s eruptions equally. That a film was old and in black and white were never reasons to exclude it from the discourse. This was when silent films were still shown on…
It may not have been exactly the best film released here in 2009 (it was close), but Uli Edel’s “The Baader Meinhof Complex” stoked my hot box like nothing else I saw last year, and it’s a movie about terrorists. A movie that heroizes terrorists. A 2.5-hour missile barrage of protest action, rock ‘n roll…
Gyorgy Palfi’s “Taxidermia” is a certain kind of movie that doesn’t have a name — we could call it scato-absurdist-expressionist outrage comedy, with a lineage that stems back to the New Wave Czechs, Makavejev, Monty Python, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Roy Andersson and the Coens, not to mention Takashi Miike, if he were Hungarian, and Guy Maddin,…
When world-class writers get to the last fifth or so of their career trajectory, after having put in four or more decades building their monuments, they often give themselves permission to write a memoir, a summing up, an attempt to gaze back and figure out how life and art have fought and entangled and rhymed…
Almost universally deplored last year, Jared Hess’ “Gentlemen Broncos” is far from a self-immolating indie-comedy disaster, but neither is it, as New Yorker film editor Richard Brody maintains, one of 2009′s best films. Honestly, it’s just different, like an idiot child who dresses funny or a spinster who gives all of her cats the same…
These days, movies can be made out of virtually nothing at all, like a poem — only a sense of drive and subject are required. Too often there’s nothing but ego at the center of today’s micro-indies, but Joshua Safdie’s “The Pleasure of Being Robbed” isn’t merely slacker realism or geysering quirk. It’s a character…
Already justly celebrated everywhere, Steve McQueen’s “Hunger” is a historical scald, a chillingly powerful portrait of state violence, a serious import about authentic political rebellion that frankly contemplates the psyches of both the oppressed and the victimizers, and one of last year’s best films by any measure. But how to write about it so that…
For most Americans who care, the Holocaust-on-film story runs something like this: outside of the release of newsreel footage after the war, and a few tame references in quasi-noirs like “Paris Underground” (1945), the extermination camp phenomenon was too recent and too toxic for mainstream film, until Alain Resnais assembled “Night and Fog” (1955), and…
Global phenom though it’s been, the Korean New Wave has been as badly hit by the 2008 economic crisis as any national industry, a situation that opened the door in the last two years for a variety of dirt-cheap indies, most notoriously Yang Ik-joon’s “Breathless,” which took South Korea by storm. The far less flamboyant…
It’s time again to note the landing of a new Wholphin, number ten this time in the biannual subscription series from Dave Eggers’ McSweeney‘s mill, and now more than ever it seems a vital project, even as our free time becomes increasingly consumed by watching and sharing viral “shorts” on YouTube. Actually, what often spurs…
Low-budget, Canadian and sneaky as hell, Bruce McDonald’s “Pontypool” is a movie that restores your faith in the ability of genre movies to rabbit-punch your limbic system and your frontal lobe at the same time. Just grabbing the ingenious premise with two hands is a moviehead thrill: the setting is the local radio station for…
You wonder if the Dardenne brothers’ no-bullshit mode of indie filmmaking will ever become over-familiar or even clichéd — it’s so simple that you can imagine scores of filmmakers using it (as of now, only a few have bothered). Honestly, though, the least simple part of it may be the most difficult: getting funding for…
