Movies about teenagers have an incredibly difficult challenge facing them from the outset. They must walk a delicate line between portraying the adolescents as unpalatable balls of angst and succumbing completely to their emotional swings; too far in one direction and the protago... Read More »
With its tonal arrhythmia and fidgety interest in perspective, Marketa Lazarova is a film of awkward transcendence, its swaths of beauty and visual charm so broad that my initial concerns of cohesion, I feel, can be justifiably dismissed. An obliquely portentous prologue sets th... Read More »
Woody Allen stands alone as a filmmaker in terms of quantity, quality, and longevity. Allen has written and directed 44 films over five decades, a record unlikely to be matched in the near or even distant future by another filmmaker. He’s also won multiple Academy Awards, three f... Read More »
I sit down for documentaries wanting the film to drop a planetary H-bomb on the obsolete—no, ruinous—process by which I until then absorbed the world and all her splendor. Splendor, I want to realize in hindsight, won’t have even begun gestating before this cinematic cataclysm. I... Read More »
Having just attended the Animal House Reunion, I was excited to see this cult-classic college comedy which I hadn’t seen since I was a child. I was full of energy—like everyone else in the near-sold-out theatre—and prepared for hilarity to ensue. The guests certainly shored up so... Read More »
With only her second feature film, veteran television screenwriter Kitagawa Eriko takes up the mantle of sensitive and playful dramas for which Iwai Shunji was known in the late 1990s and first half of the 2000s, though without the element of youth. If you can get past the superf... Read More »
On first impression, and for good reason, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) reminds me of Melville’s Le Samourai (1967), with Ryan Gosling—the driver—sporting a similar role to Jef Costello, Alain Delon’s infamously cool and mysterious lead character. In fact, before even seein... Read More »
How fitting it is that Billy Wilder’s filmography of the 1950s was bookended by Sunset Blvd. and Some Like It Hot, one a dark lamentation of the faded glory of the Hollywood studio system, the other a joyous jolt of energy that proved instrumental to its undoing. Condemned by the... Read More »
The setting is picturesque rural Denmark: Lucas (Mikkelsen) is a dedicated father and a loyal friend. He is also a kindergarten teacher and he is loved by all of those in his care. One of his students, 5 year-old Klara (Wedderkopp), develops a small crush on him. She makes a pret... Read More »
All she wanted was an apology. That’s all. In master filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), he tells the story of a woman who feels she and her family were wronged when the village chief kicked her husband in the crotch, causing injury, and refused to apologize. Q... Read More »
When looking at the works of John Landis (especially during his peak in the late 70's to mid 80's), many film geeks would look towards either his breakout hit of National Lampoon's Animal House ( a film I'm embarrassed to say is one of my cinematic blindspots) or his 1981 horror/... Read More »
Okita Shuichi’s latest is a touching and affectionate work on a year in the life of a young man, Yokomichi Yonosuke (Kora Kengo), set during Japan’s bubble economy. The year in question is 1987, Yonosuke’s first year in college in Tokyo. What at first glance seems unwieldy and na... Read More »
