Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Someone stop Tony Scott. Please. With Domino, the Top Gun auteur takes his in-your-face stylistic mannerisms to new lows, twitchily breaking up every shot with five unnecessary cuts, randomly flip-flopping between different film stocks, mixing distorted voiceover with thumping techno noise, and generally calling attention to his own behind-the-scenes presence whenever possible. Which is always.…

From its conception of the Grim Reaper as an ominous cold breeze that slays kids with elaborate Rube Goldberg traps to its profusion of turgid teen horror stereotypes, Glen Morgan and James Wong’s Final Destination series has always been a lethally leaden joke. Having handed the second installment’s reigns to David R. Ellis – who…

Chen Kaige goes soft and mushy with Together, an aggressively heartwarming tale about a teenage violin prodigy named Xiaochun (Tang Yun) and the peasant father Liu Cheng (Liu Peiqi) who relocates the boy to Taiwain in order to further his musical career. Determined to have his son attain fame and fortune, Liu persistently hounds slovenly…

For over three decades, Robert Towne has dreamed of filming Joe Fante’s Ask the Dust, a pulpy yarn about writing and racial tensions in Depression-era Los Angeles. On the basis of his Colin Farrell/Salma Hayek-headlined cinematic adaptation, it’s a dream that should have been left to die. Stale, sterile and hopelessly silly, Towne’s fourth directorial…

Asia Argento’s Scarlet Diva is like the cinematic equivalent of scabies – raw, skeevy, and more than a tad unclean – and I mean that as a compliment. The Daughter of Dario’s semi-autobiographical directorial debut wantonly wallows in the decadent filth of drugs, sex and stardom, following an up-and-coming starlet named Anna Battista (Asia) –…

A near-silent documentary journey through (and over) the Sahara scored to Leonard Cohen songs and narrated by both director Werner Herzog and German film historian Lotte Eisner (reading from the Mayan “Popul Voh” creation myth), Fata Morgana is one of Herzog’s earliest – and most evocative – cinematic essays on the uneasy relationships between man…

An unearthly companion piece to Fata Morgana, Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness presents a haunting, hellish vision of post-Gulf War Iraq in which burning oilfields, technological rubble, and lakes of black gold litter the vast desert. Via soaring, surreal aerial photography and a symphonic score of Schubert, Verdi and Wagner, Herzog’s poignant anti-war documentary approaches…

Pioneering many now-familiar slasher film tropes a good five years before John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween (with which it shares an opening POV shot from a murderer’s perspective), Black Christmas corrodes jolly yuletide cheer with some cruel prank calls, sexual tension and sorority girl slayings. Director Bob Clark works through his grisly premise – part When…

Admirably living up to its illustrious pedigree, Looney Tunes: Back in Action is like a pop culture-gorged Hope-and-Crosby buddy flick hopped up on mescaline. Working in the same rapid-fire vein as Gremlins 2: The New Batch, director Joe Dante (with a script by Larry Doyle) crams his delirious film so full of cinematic allusions, fourth…

Andrew Bujalski’s no-budget indie Funny Ha Ha is many things, but humorous – in the playful, jovial vein implied by its title – it is not. A sympathetic portrait of recent college grad Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer) as she uneventfully wanders to and fro in search of a job, a beer and love, the film affects…