Category: Reviews – Blog Only

L’Auberge Espagnole (aka “The Spanish Apartment”) offers up romantic comedy with a multicultural coming-of-age twist, following French economics student Xavier (Romain Duris) as he travels to Spain and shacks up with a diverse group of Germans, Brits, Italians and Spaniards. It’s love and maturation U.N.-style, and in director Cédric Klapisch’s hands, Xavier’s story is a…

As cheesy as some Velveeta-slathered movie theater nachos, The Poseidon Adventure may not have been producer Irwin Allen’s finest effort (that designation still goes to The Towering Inferno), but it’s nonetheless a noteworthy entry in that most goofy of ‘70s-era genres: the star-studded disaster flick. When the Poseidon luxury liner is turned upside-down by a…

In Japón, an unnamed, middle-aged painter (Alejandro Ferretis) journeys to a remote Mexican canyon village to commit suicide, only to find his plans altered by his unexpected relationship with Ascen (Magdalena Flores), a devout elderly woman in whose mountain barn he stays. This rudimentary plot description, however, barely begins to convey the fascinating wonders and…

Abel Ferrara’s original three-hour cut of Cat Chaser apparently featured a naked Kelly McGillis having a gun stuck between her spread-eagled legs, merely one of many borderline-pornographic touches that caused the film’s producers to take the film away from Ferrara and cut it down to its current 90-minute DVD form. The result of such post-production…

“Nobody’s clean,” says detective Al Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams, laying on the malt liquor charm) in Fear City, and as if to hammer home this central point about New Yorkers’ (and, by extension, mankind’s) scuzziness, director Abel Ferrara then has a teenage passerby say something to his friend about a woman and “two on one.”…

Setting a noir-ish tale of murder, dames, and drugs in and around a So Cal high school might have sounded like an inspired idea on paper, but for all its authentic hardboiled dialogue and familiar crime film tropes, Rian Johnson’s Brick never really offers an adequate justification for its central genre-transplant conceit. On a quest…

Sitcom farce, sexual violence and cross-cultural clashes all collide in Fatih Akin’s Head-On, an unconventional romance that’s ultimately more provocative than insightful. After deliberately running his car into a wall (to the sounds of Depeche Mode’s “I Feel You”), German Turk – and Bukowski-style bum – Cahit (Birol Ünel) finds himself in a psychiatric clinic,…

An elegant companion piece to Jim Jarmusch’s scraggly Year of the Horse, Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold documents the rocker’s August 2005 performance at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium during his tour for last year’s Prairie Wind (an album written while he awaited surgery to remedy a brain aneurysm). Split somewhat evenly between new tracks…

Alan Moore made quite a stink earlier this year by publicly disassociating himself from the cinematic adaptation of his 1982 graphic novel V for Vendetta, which he assumed – after unpleasant experiences with From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – would be bastardized in its translation to the screen. It turns out, however,…

Contradictions abound in Ms. 45, the most prominent of which is director Abel Ferrara’s ambiguous stance toward his pistol-packing female avenger. A mute seamstress working in NYC’s garment district, Thana (the incomparable Zoë Lund), after being raped twice in one afternoon, goes on a murderous rampage against the city’s entire male population. That the first,…