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Published Film Reviews – 2007
12/21/07 – National Treasure: Book of Secrets (Slant magazine) 12/21/07 – P.S. I Love You (Slant magazine) 12/13/07 – The Singing Revolution (Slant magazine) 12/12/07 – There Will Be Blood (Slant magazine) 12/12/07 – I Am Legend (Slant magazine) 12/12/07 – The Great Debaters (Slant magazine) 12/12/07 – A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams…
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Duck Season (2004): B+
Fernando Eimbcke’s Duck Season is one of the year’s great surprises – a nuanced, authentic portrait of adolescent ennui and maturation that treats pre-teen emotions with a Jim Jarmusch-ian brand of detached sympathy and bemusement. Set entirely on a Sunday and largely inside a high-rise Mexico tenement apartment, Eimbcke’s directorial debut concerns fourteen-year-old best friends…
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2006’s Final Links
A few more site-specific reviews – as well as an ego-stroking tally of my criticism output for the year – may appear on the blog before December 31st, but this will undoubtedly be my last collection of off-site links for 2006. So Happy Holidays to all, and I’ll see you again in 2007… Today: Night…
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indieWIRE Film Critics’ Poll ’06
As a result of the heavily documented turnover at The Village Voice, critic/editor Dennis Lim has this year relocated his annual film critics poll to indieWIRE. And once again, I was invited to contribute to Lim’s definitive year-end round-up. My “best of the year” ballot – as well as my sole contribution to the feature’s…
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Notes on a Scandal (2006): C+
Oh, how deliciously campy Notes on a Scandal might have been had director Richard Eyre taken a more deliriously hysterical approach to his material. Instead, alas, his film (based on Zoe Heller’s novel) tackles its tale of women-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown with only one eye toward frenzied feverishness, burrowing inside the crazed psyche of a schoolteacher named Barbara…
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Venus (2006): C+
Venus won’t elicit many swoons, but if Roger Michell’s film never quite musters the energy to be more than a placid hybrid of Nobody’s Fool and Lolita, it nonetheless provides a satisfactory showcase for Peter O’Toole. In the familiar role of a once-famous actor prone to drink, the aged O’Toole proves he still knows how…
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Top Ten 2006, Part I
As always, December brings with it a slew of retrospective lists. And as in 2004 and 2005, the first of my own year-end wrap-ups is the annual Slant magazine feature, in which yours truly and editor Ed Gonzalez offer up our own opinions on the last twelve months’ best and worst films. (Shamelessly self-promoting side…
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Burnout
After a final, hectic week of last-second screenings, my brain is too tired to come up with something clever to say about this bunch of reviews. So aside from pointing out that Clint Eastwood’s second WWII film of the year, Letters from Iwo Jima, is the best thing I’ve seen in the past few days,…
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Mafioso (1962): B+
Light silliness comfortably coexists with neorealist socio-economic critiques in Mafioso, a largely unseen (at least stateside) 1962 comic gem from Alberto Lattuada, a filmmaker whose international reputation has largely been predicated on his having co-directed Fellini’s Variety Lights. With this story of Northern Italian auto factory foreman Antonio Badalamenti’s (Alberto Sordi) vacation to his Southern…
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Flushed Away (2006): C+
With Flushed Away, the understated drollness that defines Aardman Studios’ finest efforts (Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) takes a back seat to the scatological hyperactivity that typifies the work of co-producer DreamWorks Animation. That the two outfits are strange bedfellows has been apparent since the outset of their union,…
