Pan’s Labrynth is shaping up to be one of the best reviewed films of the year, many claiming it to be a breakthrough for its director Guillermo Del Toro. After the bloated campiness of Hellboy and Blade 2, I’ll admit that Pan’s Labrynth is a preffered (if unprofitable) road for Del Toro to take but […]
Archive for January, 2007
For about the first 40 or so minutes Neil Jordan convinces you that The Butcher Boy is a run of the mill coming-of-age period piece. OK, so a young boy’s innocence comes undone amidst the harsh Irish surroundings — saw the same film 10 years ago when it was called “Hope and Glory”. What The […]
Apocalypto doesn’t succeed on all levels, but its at its best when it embraces itself as a big dumb action film. Its kind of like The New World meets Predator — and Mel Gibson is no Terrence Malick. On the heels of a film as transcendent and unique as The New World, scenes in Apocalypto […]
People often compare Claude Chabrol to Alfred Hitchcock, but the deceptively simple La Femme Infidele works on so many hidden layers — it makes Hitchcock look downright obvious. When Claude Chabrol reconciles his bourgeois musings and detached sensibility with an ageless plot (Husband finds out he has an unfaithful wife — husband finds guy, kills […]
While most films that sermonize about the youth in 60s and 70s seem a little embarrasingly dated today, Milos Forman’s comedy remains fresh because of his superb characterizations. The film is very similar to Cuckoo’s nest in its gallery of loopy characters, which provide marvellous texture to the 60s social climate. The film’s keen sense […]
All hail Ryan Gosling, champion of giving credibility to roles that simply should not work. He did it before as a Jewish neo-nazi (yeah you read that right) in The Believer and has done it again in Ryan Fleck’s new film Half Nelson. Here Gosling portrays a middle school history teacher who is addicted to […]
Martin Scorsese’s sterling new film isn’t so much a return to form for the director as it is a discarding of a moldy one. For the past decade he’s been in some kind of rut, a fetish fixation that has resulted in over inflated biopics and period pieces. Well I’m not sure what gave him […]
Its hard to bring much fresh into the con-man genre — The Grifters, The Sting and much of David Mamet’s work have explored the territory pretty thoroughly. The problem is, the audience is now prepped to second-guess the validity of the characters. What made Nine Queens irritating in a good way, is that we know […]
AKA “Globo-Crash”. Indeed, Arriaga and Inarritu’s has many of the same vices and virtues of the Oscar winner Crash. Because it juggles four separate narrative strands, Babel is always reasonably engrossing — unlike Crash, this film features textured characters, not just bullet points on an index card. The biggest problem with Babel however, is that […]
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