Category: Reviews – Blog Only

With uneven if generally charming results, Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s directorial debut I Love You Phillip Morris straddles the fine line between outrageous farce and heartfelt romance. Based on a true story so unbelievable that the intro credits must restate the fact that “it really did” happen, the film charts the…

Creative inspiration springs forth from endless repetition in Ne Change Rien, Pedro Costa’s non-fiction portrait of French singer/actress Jeanne Balibar. Shooting in luscious black and white and long, static takes, Costa opens on Balibar singing a sultry version of Kris Jensen’s “Torture” on stage before segueing to the recording studio, where endless rehearsals of the…

A visually ravishing, structurally beguiling portrait of post-colonial race-conflict as a hallucinatory apocalyptic dream, White Material finds Claire Denis operating in a somewhat more abstract mode than her prior 35 Shots of Rum. Working from a Marie N’Diaye script, Denis sets her tale in an anonymous African nation at an indeterminate time, a vagueness that’s…

An unconvincing ending doesn’t derail the otherwise nuanced complexity of Hideaway, François Ozon’s latest investigation of female alienation, sexuality and maternity. Ozon’s film begins with junkie Mousse (Isabelle Carré) passed out in her drug-den apartment as her boyfriend Louis (Melvil Poupaud) buys some smack, shoots up, and drifts off to the hereafter. While mourning her…

Capturing the Friedmans documentarian Andrew Jarecki segues into reality-based fiction with All Good Things, the based-on-real-events tale of a NYC real-estate tycoon heir’s rebellion against his father, his marriage, and then the apparent cover-up of the murder of his wife. Filling in back-story with staged home movies that creepily echo Friedmans’ footage, Jarecki’s fascination with…

If you’re going to imitate, you may as well imitate the best, a fact embraced by Anton Corbijn, whose The American is – in terms of tone, character and fatalism – an American rendition of Jean-Pierre Melville’s seminal existential Euro-noirs. Jack (George Clooney) is an assassin defined by a ritualistic code of conduct that, at…

A long-form sitcom overly pleased with its own progressiveness, The Kids Are All Right charts the difficulties that arise when the kids of a lesbian couple seek out their sperm-donor father. Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are a gay Oscar and Felix, and after almost two decades, their marriage has lost a spark…

Directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani know their giallos, but Amer is little more than affected homage, a work that duplicates the style and hothouse psychosexual passions of its ‘70s predecessors with such self-consciousness that little unsettling emotion emerges. There’s no conventional story per se, as Cattet and Forzani’s tale offers up a triptych of…

Make-Out with Violence plays like a faux-Wes Anderson remake of The Virgin Suicides, if Kirsten Dunst’s ethereal beauty had turned into a zombie – or, perhaps more accurately, the film feels like the work of a Donnie Darko fan intent on crafting his very own Deadly Friend. Either way, those descriptions are infinitely more flattering…

Thanks to a vicious beating outside a bar by five men, Mark Hogencamp suffered such brain damage that he lost part of his memory and, temporarily, all his motor skills. As part of his rehabilitation from this devastating incident, Hogencamp took up art and began creating Marwencol, a 1/6th-scale model WWII Belgian town in his…