Archive for May, 2008
Handsome, well-cast and expensively mounted, but there’s really nothing here that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
I found the coda to this (where we’re told what happened to the characters played by Washington and Crowe) to be dumbfounding. I’m not sure what to make of it, although the fact that we’ve been treated to the sight [...]
Intermittently serves up some of the more suffocatingly hideous and frightening imagery I’ve ever encountered.
It’s also (thank god) sometimes funny.
Some of the hall-of-mirrors / morphed identity / circular reference stuff (Laura Dern in the movie theater, or emerging onto the set from the back) was close to genius, some was at least [...]
I’ve probably seen five films by Atom Egoyan now and I’ve enjoyed them all to varying degrees. While I enjoyed this, which seems more mainstream than the others, it was somewhat disappointing. Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth are both good as the Martin & Lewis-type entertainers with an unexplained death in [...]
Dario Argento wraps up this Three Mothers trilogy, 31 years after Suspiria and 28 after Inferno. Hyperbolically gory and genuinely odd, it suffers by being linked to two of his most fully-realized fever-dream outings, but it’s very lively and he’s sure not mellowing with age.
Best thing about it is his [...]
aka Triad Election
I haven’t watched many Hong Kong films (particularly genre films) for years, and this is the first one I’ve seen by Johnnie To in a long time. The sequel to a film, but it stands on its own and is very impressive. I wasn’t sure if the lack of gunfire [...]
Our family had a subscription to the Catholic newspaper The Advocate, and as a child I’d excitedly check every week to see what movies the Legion of Decency was giving their Condemned rating to. I couldn’t imagine what was going on in these things that made it an actual sin [...]
Very sharp character study / crime drama that’s the directorial debut of writer Scott Frank. A young man - a former golden boy - who’s suffered brain damage in an auto accident has a job as janitor in a bank, and is manipulated into assisting in a robbery. Lots of good performances, good writing, scary [...]