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Horror of Dracula 1958
Terence Fisher’s movie, while retaining the novel’s 19th century setting, clearly uses Bram Stoker’s story as a means of commenting on the still-stifling social mores of post-war Britain. The filmmakers certainly knew what they were doing when they cast the sensual and charismatic Lee as Dracula and the stuffier, more reactionary-seeming Cushing as Van Helsing.
Full review at my blog: whitecitycinema.com/2013/05/06/blu-hammer/
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Barbara 2012
Barbara is built on quietness and patience, and is grounded in an impressively real-world sense of what daily life in East Germany must have been like (i.e., an atmosphere of almost-banal mistrust) shortly before the worldwide collapse of Communism.
Full review at my blog: whitecitycinema.com/2013/04/29/now-playing-stoker-and-barbara/
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Stoker 2013
As the film progresses, the indeterminate yet vividly dream-like setting (America as filtered through the imagination of a Korean obsessed with classic American cinema) starts to become its strongest virtue.
Full review at my blog: whitecitycinema.com/2013/04/29/now-playing-stoker-and-barbara/
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Las cosas como son 2012
Las Cosas Como Son is the reason why film festivals exist. It’s a shoestring indie made without “stars” in a country that doesn’t have a large local industry but is so impeccably crafted and so compelling in terms of content that it will likely blow away any lucky viewers who are curious enough to take a chance on it based on festival catalog descriptions. This exceedingly realistic drama, the fiction feature debut of Chilean writer/director Fernando Lavanderos, concerns the strange…
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Upstream Color 2013
Upstream Color is ultimately not a story-driven movie. It is a remarkably singular and wholly entrancing sensory experience in which the narrative elements serve as a starting point for Carruth to explore themes of love, loss, identity, consciousness and rebirth. I have no reservations about calling it American filmmaking at its most original and ambitious; or, to put it another way, this is the movie that I wanted The Tree of Life to be.
Full review at my blog: whitecitycinema.com/2013/04/12/now-playing-upstream-color/
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Spring Breakers 2013
A bevy of bikini-clad babes beer bongwater bacchanal booyah beach-noir bouncing boobs butts Brueghel Bosch
Full review at my blog: whitecitycinema.com/2013/04/01/now-playing-spring-breakers/
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The World 2004
Jia Zhangke is regarded by many critics as one of the key directors of the 21st century. While I can’t say I share this view of his filmography as a whole, I do regard his 2004 film The World as an unqualified masterpiece. Set in a Beijing theme park named “The World,” which boasts scale model replicas of the world’s most recognizable landmarks (the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, etc.), and tracking the lives of the alienated workers…
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Satantango 1994
Based on László Krasznahorkai's famed novel, which I haven't read but which has been favorably compared to the works of William Faulkner, my favorite American author, this seven-and-a-half hour Hungarian epic is one of the defining -- and most purely cinematic -- movies of recent decades (unlike. say, The Decalogue, director Bela Tarr wants you to see this on the big screen in a single sitting). The plot has something to do with a pair of con artists, Irimias (Mihály…
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You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet 2012
The way Resnais uses his characters’ memories as a catalyst for blurring the lines between real life and art, actor and character, and past and present, is ultimately what makes You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet a worthy addition to the director’s formidable canon (alongside such universally acknowledged masterpieces as Last Year at Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Muriel, as well as his more undervalued recent films), and reminds us of the old adage about how great artists always recreate the same work over and over again, just in refreshingly different ways.
Full review at my blog: whitecitycinema.com/2013/03/18/now-playing-you-aint-seen-nothin-yet/
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How Green Was My Valley 1941
John Ford's masterpiece deservedly beat out Citizen Kane for the Best Picture Oscar in 1941. My review of Fox's superb new Blu-ray:
http://whitecitycinema.com/2013/03/11/how-blu-was-my-valley/
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The Last Time I Saw Macao 2012
I don’t know what they’re putting in the water in Portugal to breed such great filmmakers but this fascinating narrative/travelogue hybrid is further proof that contemporary Portuguese cinema is among the most exciting on the planet. “Da Mata,” a character presumably played by the co-director of the same name, is a Portuguese man who travels to Macao after an old friend, a transvestite/prostitute named Candy, requests help after falling into trouble there with some underworld figures. Upon arrival, he is…
