Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Fixating again on thorny economic, race and age-related power dynamics, Laurent Cantet peeks inside an urban French public school classroom and finds ubiquitous tension in The Class. Asked what his favorite part of the school year was, a French student discusses learning about shifting tectonic plates, an apt remark for a film deeply engrossed with…

Fernando Meirelles, he of the noxiously overpraised City of God and The Constant Gardener, may be the most pretentious filmmaker working today. An artist who can’t let a single frame exist without some form of look-at-me embroidery, Meirelles’ primary interest is stroking his own ego through excessive aesthetic exhibitions, a reputation reconfirmed by Blindness, an…

Superficially, Burn After Reading – a spy spoof about a bunch of nitwits knee-deep in baffling espionage – couldn’t have less in common with the Coen Brothers’ previous, Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. Yet as it smoothly segues from one goofy scenario to another, the surface foolishness of the Coens’ latest feels like a…

Because no sport should be deprived the inspirational Hollywood treatment, rugby finally gets a chance to take center screen courtesy of Forever Strong, a based-on-actual-events tale of a punk who, through an unlikely turn of events, winds up playing rugby for the hated rivals of his high school team, which is coached by his demanding…

Mixing nihilistic wit, stringent social satire and jagged pathos, Chuck Palahniuk’s writing has a tendency to careen wildly between bracing mordancy and messy, faux-shocking salaciousness. For a time, Clark Gregg’s adaptation of the Fight Club author’s Choke delivers enough of the former to compensate for the latter as it focuses on the plight of Victor…

Alan Ball returns to nasty, vile, repressed suburbia with Towelhead, an adaptation of Alicia Erian’s novel that the American Beauty writer fashions into another cartoonishly broad, repulsive vision of middle-class life. In a cookie-cutter Texas planned community in the early ‘90s (an arbitrary time frame employed mainly for its slightly dated outfits), thirteen-year-old Arab-American Jasira…

Delivering social-realism tension without once dipping its toes into mobster-glorification waters, Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah – adapted from Roberto Saviano’s bestselling tome – is a tough, cynical, blistering fictionalized study of the Camorra crime organization that controls much of Naples (as well as wields worldwide influence, including having contributed money to the reconstruction of the World…

Failing to fulfill the promise of his stunning 2002 documentary Bus 174, José Padilha succumbs to monotonous, hollow flamboyance with his City of God clone Elite Squad. Co-written by God scribe Bráulio Mantovani, Padilha’s film peeks into Rio de Janeiro’s crime-ridden slums via the viewpoint of the police and, specifically, the BOPE special forces unit…

Unlike Incident at Loch Ness, no knowledge of Werner Herzog’s career is required to fully appreciate screenwriter Zak Penn’s sophomore directorial effort The Grand. Respectfully sending up the professional poker tournaments that crowd ESPN’s various networks, Penn’s loose, semi-improvised story takes place at the titular contest, where a variety of colorful characters compete for a…

While Bangkok Dangerous proves that Danny and Oxide Pang know how to deliver kinetic, visually arresting action, it also establishes their too-intimate familiarity with the work of John Woo and Wong Kar-Wai, two Hong Kong auteurs whose style and tropes are aped mercilessly throughout this hitman-with-a-soul saga. Deaf-mute Kong (Pawalit Mongkolpisit) takes out inner fury…