Category: Reviews – Blog Only

The excessive narrative convolutions of James Ellroy’s 1987 novel The Black Dahlia were compensated for by the hardboiled author’s prose – as brutally concise and muscular as a punch to the face – and its ability to convey fanatically obsessive, out-of-control passions. For his big-screen adaptation, Brian De Palma attempts the same trick via cinematic…

A policier beset by melancholy and infused with turbulent social-political shadings, Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder almost single-handedly resuscitates the moribund serial killer genre. Based on a notorious 1986 South Korean case in which the tortured and mutilated corpses of young women were found strewn throughout the rural countryside, Bong’s superbly wrought film traces two…

Humdrum explicit sex, patchy humor and crude melodrama converge in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, a graphic rom-com in which the bedroom dilemmas of alterna-lifestyling New Yorkers serve as reflections of both their deep-seated emotional problems and the city’s general post-9/11, Iraq war-fostered discontent. At the titular outcast-courting club (named after the derogatory designation for the…

Having previously helmed the non-fictional One Day in September and semi-documentary Touching the Void, director Kevin MacDonald now makes the leap into full-fledged dramatic filmmaking – while nonetheless retaining his interest in historical subject matter – with The Last King of Scotland, an “inspired by true events” tale of young Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan (James…

Utilizing an intertwined multi-character narrative so laughably contrived it borders on self-parody, The Last Kiss (L’Ultimo Bacio) repackages messy human dilemmas into something neat, tidy and oh-so-manipulatively inspiring. Gabriele Muccino’s knotted tale follows four close friends, their wives/lovers/one-night stands, and one older married couple as they struggle to navigate various romantic predicaments, all of which…

For much of its first half, The Ground Truth is a documentary in search of a theme, with director Patricia Foulkrod leveling cursory criticisms against the Iraq war’s execution, the armed forces’ marketing campaigns and xenophobia-laced basic training procedures, and the media’s soft-peddling coverage of non-combatant fatalities, all in the hope that one will stick.…

There’s a reason that Jan Svankmajer’s reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s seminal children’s fable is titled simply Alice – namely, because the bizarre, unsettling and occasionally terrifying world that his pint-sized heroine (Kristyna Kohoutova) magically enters is anything but a delightful wonderland. Melding live-action with stop-motion animation, Svankmajer remains largely faithful to his source material’s narrative…

German provocateur Michael Haneke operates in a vein similar to the villain of Code Unknown’s movie-within-the-movie The Collector, trapping his characters in meticulously constructed, confining scenarios in order to punish them. The difference, however, is that whereas the nefarious Collector’s plot against star Anne (Juliette Binoche) is seemingly perpetrated for no reason, Haneke has a…

Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby is the feminine flip-side to Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson, less because its narrative centers on a Caucasian heroin junkie working with African-American children, and more because it’s a similar bit of trite indie melodrama bolstered by a searing lead performance. As Sherry Swanson, a recently paroled addict determined to win back custody…

Proving the old adage about less being more, Versus piles on so much geektastic pandemonium that it quickly results in sensory overload. Taking an exhausting kitchen-sink approach to genre hybridization, director Ryuhei Kitamura melds yakuza, samurai, and zombie films via this tale of an escaped convict (Tak Sakaguchi) who, having been broken out of jail…