Category: Reviews – Blog Only

In many respects the Southern sibling of 2004’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell’s latest act of comedic absurdity Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is also, beneath its product placement-pockmarked façade and heavy layer of ludicrousness, a loving send-up of 21st century American pop and political culture. Delivering a barrage of…

Without much kink or florid hysteria to enliven its narrative complications, Volver proves to be one of Pedro Almodóvar’s most temperamentally restrained efforts, though such a muted tone doesn’t detract from its emotional power. The Spanish maestro’s latest is, as its title (translation: “To Return”) implies, a revisitation of many familiar Almodóvar fixations (if not…

With its interest in ritual as a dehumanizing/transcendent force, its unaffected performances, and its methodical, meditative widescreen cinematography, Battle in Heaven naturally elicits comparisons to the work of Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky. And at times, director Carlos Reygadas’s follow-up to 2002’s Jápon seems a tad too convinced that it belongs in such rarified company,…

Tony Jaa knows how to jump over, around and through environmental objects. He knows how to punch, kick and spin with both power and speed. And he definitely knows how to deliver airborne knees to the head and crushing elbows to the cranium. What eludes the agile martial artist, however, is how to act, a…

To reference The Illusionist’s most obvious cinematic forerunner would be to ruin its central revelation, but suffice it to say that Neil Burger’s period piece (based on Steven Millhauser’s short story “Eisenheim The Illusionist”) – about a mysterious magician named Eisenheim (Edward Norton) who causes much consternation for Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) in turn-of-the-century…

The marriage at the center of Gabrielle dissolves as a result of apathy, but there’s nothing lethargic about Patrice Chéreau’s period piece, an emotionally explosive adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s short story “The Return” that simmers with anger, resentment and long-suppressed desire. Walking from the train to his Paris home in what appears to be the…

One of noir’s most soulful and poetic expressions of hope and redemption – two commodities usually in short supply in the fatalistic genre – Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground begins hard and bitter, only to slowly transform into something gentle and poignant. Detective Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is so repulsed by the seedy urban underworld…

The Brothers Quay don’t stray far from their stop-motion roots with Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life, their first live-action feature (based upon Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gutten). Revisiting their animated shorts’ idiosyncratic visual and thematic preoccupations, the Quays’ film follows everyman Jakob (Mark Rylance) as he enrolls at the titular…

Though Mildred Pierce is renowned for marking Joan Crawford’s return to the apex of Hollywood stardom (after ditching long-time studio MGM), Michael Curtiz’s adaptation of hardboiled author James M. Cain’s novel is, first and foremost, a hearty genre pic fraught with tense social/sexual anxieties. Divorcing her unemployed husband, Mildred (Crawford) sets about supporting her two…

Michael Mann’s Miami Vice not only strips its iconic TV source material (on which Mann served as executive producer and creative head honcho) down to the barest of essentials, but it also functions as the purest, most evocative distillation yet of the director’s fascination with the thin line separating cops and crooks, identity confusion, the…