Mother is a strange and compelling film that stretches the bounds of audience sympathy, and manages to work equally well whether or not it is maintained for its entire running length
Mother
Directed by Joon-Ho Bong
Maternal pain is the driving force behind Korean wunderkind Joon-Ho Bong’s fourth feature, acting as the practically exclusive catalyst for a [...]
Day One
As opposed to Cannes (open only to film professionnals), the Berlin Film Festival is open to everyone, and it is possible to see people lining for hours (sometimes under the snow) in order to get tickets for films from Taiwan, Latvia or Paraguay. This gives the entire city a really festive touch, with posters [...]
Albert and Allen Hughes, better known simply as the Hughes Brothers, have been kicking around since the early nineties, but you’d be forgiven for a bit of confusion thanks to their schizophrenic filmography. After helming some music videos, the twins made an envious feature debut at Cannes in 1993 at only 21 years of age [...]
Thanks to the Hollywood Foreign Press, awards season is officially underway, and that means the fine art of movie-geek prognostication can begin in earnest. Of course, a whole lot of well-received films will never see the inside of a ballot box, so besides taking some time to discuss the Golden Globes (and other pressing business), [...]
Tragically, there’s ample evidence onscreen of Jackson’s love for the material, but he brings to the table none of the qualities that made Creatures – another drama surrounding pubescent girls and grisly acts – such a startling breakthrough.
The Lovely Bones
Directed by Peter Jackson
At this point, Peter Jackson probably isn’t the sort of filmmaker [...]
Workmanlike and inoffensive, Brothers will neither devastate nor severely disappoint.
Brothers
Directed by Jim Sheridan
The latest in a long line of Sheridan dramas oriented around family units, Brothers, adapted from the 2004 Danish feature of the same name, is competently constructed and generally well-performed, but hovers just above mediocrity throughout the proceedings. Perhaps in the post-Rachel [...]
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Directed by Chris Weitz
Are we to expect more from a feature film than from an average episode of a daytime soap? That’s one of many questions to be begged not only of casual moviegoers but of even the most hardened fan of Stephenie Meyer’s socially negligent Twilight series as they take [...]
The Box
Directed by Richard Kelly
Anyone expecting Donnie Darko and Southland Tales director Richard Kelly to finally dial back on his idiosyncrasies in service of a familiar conceit may be surprised to find his peculiar voice very much present in The Box, his third feature. Where initial reports suggested a fairly conventional take on the Twilight [...]
Handsome Harry
Directed by Bette Gordon
A spectacular cast and a deliberate tone help to distract from director Bette Gordon’s Handsome Harry, which acts both as an emotionally detailed character study and a slightly ungainly road movie. The titular Harry (Jamey Sheridan), an aging ex-Navy electrician, is shaken from his cozy small-town existence when he receives a [...]
Mother
Directed by Joon-Ho Bong
Maternal pain is the driving force behind Korean wunderkind Joon-Ho Bong’s fourth feature, acting as the practically exclusive catalyst for a film that seems to delight in toying with audience expectations. Kim Hye-Ja, whose thin resumé does nothing to foreshadow her towering work here, stars as the titular matriarch, whose life is [...]
Dirty Mind
Directed by Peter Van Hees
Left Bank director Peter Van Hees tries his hand at offbeat comedy in Dirty Mind, which centers around a conceit that seems promising on paper but winds up as the delivery system for a disappointingly familiar experience. Wim Helsem, impressive in his feature debut, stars as meek stuntman’s assistant Diego, [...]
Antichrist
Directed by Lars von Trier
Plunging headfirst into a realm of depraved evil, leaving behind him any and all polite norms of filmmaking (mainstream, independent or otherwise), Lars von Trier has unleashed his most audacious creation to date, which has been branded everything from “misogynistic” (according the Cannes` Ecumenical Jury, who awarded it a special “Anti-Prize”) [...]
Up In The Air
Directed by Jason Reitman
Obscure alt-culture references are nowhere to be found in Jason Reitman`s follow-up to his sharply divisive runaway smash Juno. Instead, Up In the Air turns sharply towards the dramatic, a move that proved mildly disastrous for fellow comedy dynamo Judd Apatow just a few months ago, [...]
Trash Humpers
Directed by Harmony Korine
Anyone who enjoyed Korine’s previous feature, the funny, surreal Mister Lonely, may have been looking forward to what he was to do next in anticipation of a further expansion into pseudo-accessible territory. Instead, Korine decided to jump off the arthouse deep end with Trash Humpers, a reasonably well-executed conceptual short that [...]
Antichrist
Directed by Lars von Trier
Plunging headfirst into a realm of depraved evil, leaving behind him any and all polite norms of filmmaking (mainstream, independent or otherwise), Lars von Trier has unleashed his most audacious creation to date, which has been branded everything from “misogynistic” (according the Cannes` Ecumenical Jury, who awarded it a special “Anti-Prize”) [...]
