Letterboxd — Your life in film

Review from my Transylvania International Film Festival 2013 roundup

Taking a setup that’s been done to death and beyond before, Burkhardt Wunderlich’s wonderfully simple screenplay is the basis of a movie that makes its most profound impacts reworking formulae with fresh new consequences. Breaking Horizons’ focus on the unexpected pregnancy of a lost-in-life, layabout architecture student is a familiar conduit to a striking voyage through uncharted emotional waters. Director Pola Schirin Beck and lead Aylin Tezel do extraordinary work together,…

Review from my Transylvania International Film Festival 2013 roundup

Maybe the most well-known film in competition, Danish drama A Hijacking has already seen theatrical release in some territories, where it’s been rightly hailed as a masterclass in tension. Writer/director Tobias Lindholm’s remarkable ability to paint knuckles white is no surprise, his role in scripting Thomas Vinterberg’s terrific The Hunt considered; here he makes excellent use of the cramped confines of the cargo ship and boardroom in which the drama primarily…

Review from Next Projection

“The Hangover without the jokes” might be the most appropriate descriptor for Wish You Were Here, were it not already laid claim to by The Hangover: Part II. Produced by Blue-Tongue Films, the leading Australian filmmaking collective whose prior credits include The Square and Animal Kingdom, as well as several excellent short films, this new movie embodies every strength of the growing production house—from its now A-list talent to the impeccable production values that have come…

Review from Next Projection

Any devotee of contemporary Romanian cinema will point you to the prominent distinction between two strands in the country’s filmic output. There are those realism-inclined movies concerned with issues facing the nation now, and there is the plethora of pictures that—like in any country relieved of a regime that oppressed free speech—retrospectively deal with the problems of the past. But then, of course, there is the handful of exceptions: the films that concern themselves directly with…

Review from Next Projection

One of the most promising of Romania’s “second tier” of filmmakers, as it were—his works have yet to achieve the attention of the likes of Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, or Radu Muntean—Dan Chisu has proved himself every bit as adept and versatile a director as his most famous countrymen. His feature debut was 2010’s WebSiteStory, a fine start for any director, and one of the more interesting cinematic looks at the impact of emergent technology on…

Review from Next Projection

It’s a magical state of perpetual transition, student life, caught halfway between the worlds of childhood education and adult actuality, just far removed enough from the harsh realities of life to still retain some shred of the vibrant optimism of youth. Firmly targeted toward some idyllic professional outcome, the student experience is—for many, if not most—one last spell of fun before the cruel mundanity of reality arrives to take its place. That’s the old cliché, at…

Review from Next Projection

“Appearances or indiscretion.
Friendship or family.
Life or dreams.
Society or status.
Such things are powerless in the presence of the feeling of love.”

There could hardly be more appropriate words on which to begin I Catch a Terrible Cat, Japanese writer/director Rikiya Imaizumi’s richly funny investigation of the strange phenomenon of love through the story of aging novelist Norifumi Takada, from whose The Immaculate Cat the quote is taken. He, standing on the precipice of…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

Returning the cinematic representation of the zombie legend to its Haitian origins as seen in the likes of White Zombie, Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow sees the horror maestro put his own personal spin on the undead mythology. It’s his reliably creepy direction, best put to use in a series of remarkably unsettling nightmare scenes, that makes the film as interesting a genre piece as it is; the script,…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

The final feature role of Marlon Brando, Frank Oz’s The Score is second a heist movie, first a curious coming-together of three actors at various points of a typical Hollywood career. Brando, of course, was at the end by 2001, appearing here as but a bloated shadow of the phenomenal performer he once was in the role of a criminal mastermind; Robert De Niro, his own descent from greatness then well…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

By 1997, Francis Ford Coppola’s stock could hardly have fallen much further. The glory days of the 1970s long behind him, 1996’s Jack saw the most unanimously negative reviews of his career—indeed of most careers. He bounced back well with The Rainmaker, a terrifically entertaining courtroom drama named by John Grisham as his favourite adaptation of any of his novels. Starring a young Matt Damon as an idealistic attorney whose view…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

It’s films the like of The Numbers Station that call into question the appellation “thriller”: sure, it may act firstly as generic description, offering an instant impression of what the plot may involve, but it also—mistakenly, in this case—suggests that, at some point, at least one thrill might be had. Not so, and as its lazily vague story—following a disgraced CIA operative tasked with guarding the titular facility and its code-reading…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

Too few people saw Mean Creek, the dark, brooding, often brilliant bully drama that comprised the promising feature debut of writer/director Jacob Aaron Estes. It was seven years before he returned with The Details, starring Tobey Maguire as a suburban husband whose marital problems drive him to infidelity, and whose growing pest problems seem determined to drive him to madness. Here embracing comedy, Estes is somehow even more cynical in his…