Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Simultaneously reveling in, and critiquing, sexualized racist exploitation, Black Venus generates minor friction from its two-facedness, if not nearly enough to overshadow its prime goal of punishing the audience. Writer/director Abdellatif Kechiche’s follow-up to The Secret of the Grain tells the true-life tale of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman (Yahima Torres), aka the “Hottentot Venus,” a South…

Setting aside the fact that it exists only because American moviegoers prefer not to read subtitles, Let Me In more or less faithfully duplicates 2009’s Swedish vampire drama Let the Right One In, the changes made to its predecessor roughly split between the inspired and misbegotten. Cloverfield director Matt Reeves doesn’t take many chances in…

Removing at least an hour from Aurora, Cristi Puiu’s follow-up to 2005’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, wouldn’t alter its plot or themes one iota, a situation that makes this three-hour portrait of stasis and emptiness a monumental slog to endure. Viorel (Puia himself) roams the Romanian countryside with, initially, no apparent motive or destination…

An astonishingly multilayered portrait of a romantic relationship that doubles as a commentary on the value of reproductions – and, thus, the cinema itself – Certified Copy finds Abbas Kiarostami returning triumphantly, after years of DV experimentation, to the realm of narrative filmmaking. From conversational scenes set inside a car to discussions being interrupted by…

A beguiling fable about transition and transformation, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival) reconfirms Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul as one of the medium’s most mesmeric visionaries. Set in the humid, gauzy northern Thailand jungles, where fifty years earlier the indigent citizens were…

Exhilarating, exasperating, inspired and redundant, Enter the Void is a film of equal parts greatness and silliness, a psychedelic head-trip that only irregularly achieves the grandeur it seeks. Expanding upon many of the ideas addressed in his prior Irreversible, Gaspar Noé’s latest is often a frustratingly shallow creation in terms of characterizations, dialogue and narrative…

A multilayered portrait of immense physical, emotional and psychological change, Kimberly Reed’s Prodigal Sons charts the filmmaker’s high school reunion homecoming to Helena, Montana, a trip made uncomfortable by the fact that Reed left the state a man (and star quarterback, no less) named Paul, and now returns years later a transgendered woman. Her documentary…

When it comes to chic cinematic action, Milla Jovovich may be the poor woman’s Angelina Jolie, but her Resident Evil saga continues to be one of the millennium’s only adequate B-movie franchises. In this fourth installment, the first to be helmed by creator Paul W. S. Anderson since 2002’s original, as well as the maiden…

A character study whose two protagonists don’t resemble human beings but intricately assembled screenwriter constructions, Jack Goes Boating proves an inauspicious start to the directorial career of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also stars in this adaptation of Bob Glaudini’s 2007 play. Hoffman previously presented Glaudini’s work at New York City’s Joseph Papp Public Theater. Yet…

Never Let Me Go has a premise at odds with itself, a conflicted condition that can’t be salvaged by a trio of fine performances. Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed 2005 novel concerns the romantically prickly relationship in 1970s England of three friends – Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and the boy they…