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The Loneliest Planet 2012
While the title is a good fit for this film a more accurate one might have been Rupture. This is not just because of The Incident, which creates a rupture in the protagonists’ relationship at the halfway mark of the film, but also because of Loktev's regular use of extreme long-shots. The most obvious point of these shots relates to the official title: they show how isolated these three people are in the magisterial Georgian landscape. But they're also about…
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Zero Dark Thirty 2012
I did write a bunch of stuff but then I went and reread Vadim Rizov's notes and decided that what I'd written wasn't worth a damn.
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I Saw The Devil 2011
Rote plot twists and suspense beats turn what should be an unnerving descent into moral hell into yet another tired revenge thriller. If Kim really wanted to put his hero through a meat grinder he could have made a noir film in which the protagonist is constantly, inexorably drawn towards his fate. Instead I Saw the Devil employs constant cat and mouse set pieces where the question is less about what will be left of the hero and more about…
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Seven Psychopaths 2012
Plays like a Cabin in the Woods for mouthy, British gangster films. Which is to say that it's often clever and funny but rarely more incisive then the average blog post bemoaning Guy Ritchie's oeuvre or lamenting the state of modern horror. I mean, pointing out that women rarely get substantial roles in crime films isn't exactly the stuff of which incisive critiques are made, and it doesn't help that, much like The Cabin in the Woods, it wants to have its objectifying cake and eat it too.
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Beasts of the Southern Wild 2012
I don't think that Beasts portrayal of: (a) People preferring to stay in their homes in the face of imminent danger even if it isn't the safest place and (b) their rejection of aid that didn’t include them in the decision making process of what was to be done and how amounts to the naive fantasy of self-sufficiency that its detractors insist it is.
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Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! 1990
This review reportedly contains spoilers. I can handle the truth.
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Polisse 2011
This review reportedly contains spoilers. I can handle the truth.
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This Must Be the Place 2012
Even before the Cannes line-up had been seen This Must Be the Place cemented its place as the odd duck of the festival. The juxtaposition of Sean Penn dressed up in flamboyant gothic attire with an ostensibly serious storyline involving the holocaust had critics speculating less as to whether Sorrentino had gone off the rails and more as to what extent he'd gone off the rails. It's rather unfortunate then, that the finished product is not a brightly burning film…
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Goodbye First Love 2011
I have mixed feelings about The Father of My Children and this film shares both its removed, albeit not bloodless, approach to a personal subject and its bifurcated structure. Yet, for whatever reason, this one went over a little better. Maybe it's because the element that made The Father of My Children into a kind of grief procedural (the systematic tying up of loose financial and emotional ends) is absent in this film, in which loose ends are simply put…
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Coriolanus 2012
The Balkans imagery is a huge mistake. It's one thing to say the play has relevance to modern political leaders and war, quite another to suggest it has import for a specific conflict. As a result of trying to stretch the play to get it to say things that it was never intended to say Fiennes ends up with images such as an Otpor-like flag in the hands of Coriolanus's citizen oppressors which hopelessly muddles his subtext or renders it outright offensive.
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I Wish 2012
“What does “Indie” mean?”
“I think it means you have to try harder.”Fans of Kore-eda may fear that his latest, a narrative about kids attempting to reunite their split family by the power of a wish granted by a bullet train, may represent an avowal of the above sentiment. It has, after all, been payed for largely by a bullet train company and both the tone of the advertising and its early reception have hinted that it might be…
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Las Acacias 2011
Las Acacias is so completely underwhelming as to suggest that this year’s Critics' Week committee are playing a joke on audiences worldwide. The film traces the unendingly bland, predictable first steps of a burgeoning couples’ relationship as one is forced by his boss to take the other and her baby cross-country in his truck.
The director’s choice to largely confine his movie to a truck’s cab, with its attendant limited opportunities for clever framing, suggests that he had a lot…
