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Primer (2004): C-
Eager to hit the entrepreneurial jackpot, two ambitious yuppie engineers (Shane Carruth and David Sullivan) accidentally create a functional time travel machine – and numerous time-space paradoxes – in Shane Carruth’s wearisome Primer. Substituting the giddy fantasy of Back to the Future for grave technological authenticity, the film (written and directed by star Carruth) has…
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The Machinist (2004): C
Christian Bale dropped a shockingly immense amount of weight for Brad Anderson’s The Machinist, but like the film itself, Bale’s drastic pound-shedding is a gimmick with no real payoff. Sure, Bale – as Trevor Reznik, an industrial machine operator whose sanity begins to unravel due to a year-long bout of sleeplessness – is a frightening…
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THX 1138 (1971): C+
Before the world-conquering Star Wars made him a popcorn movie mega-mogul, George Lucas crafted a modest, somber vision of the future with THX 1138. In place of lightsabers, Death Stars and furry 7-foot tall animals, Lucas’ filmmaking debut takes place in an Orwellian world in which people are identified by letter and number designations, spied…
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Millennium Mambo (2001): B
As the new millennium dawns, Vicky (Qi Shu) balances separate love affairs with abusive, drug-smoking Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan) and paternal petty gangster Jack (Jack Kao) in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s exquisite Millennium Mambo. Narrated (in hindsight) by Vicky from the year 2011, the film’s splintered, flashback-heavy narrative nominally concerns Vicky’s tumultuous two romances, though the storyline is…
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Flowers of Shanghai (1998): B+
A story of insularity, slavery and sexual politics, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s straightforward period piece Flowers of Shanghai tells the story of four brothel houses (“flower houses”) and the relationships shared between its wealthy patrons and attractive, cunning employees (“flower girls”). In 1880s Shanghai, wealthy men spend their days and nights gambling, playing drinking games, feasting and…
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Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996): A-
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s first film set entirely in present-day Taiwan, Goodbye South, Goodbye concerns two low-level gangster brothers – easygoing Gao (Jack Kao) and impulsive Flathead (Giong Lim) – who, along with their girlfriends Pretzel (Annie Shizuka Inoh) and Ying (Kuei-Yin Hsu), navigate the rural outskirts of Taipei trying to earn enough money to open a…
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Good Men, Good Women (1995): B+
The lingering effect of the past on the present is once again Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s thematic focus in Good Men, Good Women, which jumps back and forth between contemporary Taiwan, the immediate past, and the 1940s and ‘50s to tell a fractured tale of personal and national treachery. Lian Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh) is an actress…
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The Hitcher (1986): C
I’ve always found Rutger Hauer to be an awesomely menacing actor, and The Hitcher – Robert Harmon’s preposterous thriller about a kid named Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) who picks up a hitchhiker (Hauer) in Texas and winds up being terrorized by the stranger – does nothing to dispel that notion. The film, written by…
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House of Flying Daggers (2004): A
Mere months after the U.S. release of Zhang Yimou’s Hero – a film which was made in 2002 but then inexplicably left on a shelf for two years by Miramax – the acclaimed Chinese director returns with House of Flying Daggers, a significantly superior samurai epic about an ardent love triangle between a fetching assassin…
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I Heart Huckabees (2004): B-
Maddeningly uneven but mildly amusing, David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees – a philosophical examination of the meaning of life disguised as a droll screwball comedy – had me simultaneously laughing at its good-natured wackiness and revolting against its faux-weighty intellectualism. Earnest environmentalist Albert (Jason Schwartzman) is fighting urban sprawl by working to protect marshland…
