Tasteless but by no means mindless, Sacha Baron Cohen is the most incendiary Jewish performance artist since Lenny Bruce. (You were thinking Jackie Mason?) Although his personal ideology would seem to be some form of left Zionism, his vaudeville travesties and gross-out pranks outrage nationalists of all persuasions and moralizers across the political spectrum. Read [...] Read more – ‘The Not-So-Great ‘Dictator’ [Tablet]’.
Mad terror in the streets as flying whatsits and killer robots from outer space ricochet off and, more often, crash through 70-story skyscrapers. Mighty towers crumble; concrete chunks spray from the screen. Total Sensurround: the theatre itself shakes as the non-stop cosmic battle-cum-pinball game that is The Avengers reaches its climax in a digital midtown [...] Read more – ‘On The Avengers and 9/11 [Guardian]’.
Chilean director Cristián Jiménez’s “Bonsái” is the essence of cosmopolitan provincialism — a superbly grounded, programmatically small, meta-literary tragicomedy of student-boho life. Read more… Read more – ‘Bonsái [Artinfo]’.
Over the past two decades, Tim Burton has cast Johnny Depp as a succession of Anglo-American archetypes: Ed Wood, Ichabod Crane, Willy Wonka (an interpretation many thought inspired by Anna Wintour), Sweeney Todd, the Mad Hatter, and now Barnabas Collins, the reluctant vampire hero of the beloved TV soap opera “Dark Shadows” (ABC, 1966-71), lavishly revisited, although not [...] Read more – ‘Dark Shadows [Artinfo]’.
There are movies that (just as there are people who) take such pleasure in themselves that you can’t help but admire them. It’s contagious — they are enchanting precisely they so openly revel in their movie-ness. “Casablanca” may be the best-known, but the supreme example is surely Jacques Rivette’s 1974 “Celine and Julie Go Boating.” [...] Read more – ‘Revisiting “Celine and Julie Go Boating” [Artinfo]’.
Re-released in a lovingly restored print on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, Shirley Clarke’s debut film The Connection is an excavated relic of an earlier New York. The movie adapts an off-Broadway blockbuster—Jack Gelber’s “jazz play” of the same name—and concerns a filmmaker’s foredoomed attempt to document a gaggle of heroin addicts while they [...] Read more – ‘Talking Smack About Junk: “The Connection” [NYRBlog]’.
One of the most amiable and least predictable of American directors, Austin-based indie Richard Linklater follows his deft period reconstruction “Me and Orson Welles” and animated Philip K. Dick yarn “A Scanner Darkly” with an exercise in regional humor. “Bernie” is a true-life Texas tall-tale about a murderous funeral director and the little town of Carthage [...] Read more – ‘The All-Too Affable Ballad of “Bernie”’.
With regard to longevity and productivity, not to mention talent, the only peers of the great Spanish director Luis Buñuel (1900–83) are his contemporaries Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. The old Surrealist was, however, a far slyer fox. Read more… Read more – ‘A Charismatic Chameleon: On Luis Buñuel [The Nation]’.
“The Devil, Probably,” one of the great Robert Bresson’s greatest, and least-seen, movies gets a week-long run (April 20-26) in the midst of BAMcinématek’s Bresson retrospective — resplendent in a new 35mm print and hailed by no less an authority than Richard Hell as “the most punk movie ever made.” Read more… Read more – ‘The Devil, Probably’.
An unverifiable, if heartfelt, assertion: For the quarter century between 1945 and 1970 (or from Rome Open City to Fellini Satyricon), the world’s greatest popular cinema was produced in Italy—a realm of glamorous superstars, sensational comedians, and great genre flicks. A half dozen maestros were backed by a remarkably deep bench, including writer-director Mario Monicelli [...] Read more – ‘The Organizer: Description of a Struggle’.
“It’s thrilling left-wing trash,” Village Voice critic David Edelstein ended his review of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” “and it’s more or less disposable.” Thrilling (at times), left-wing (I guess), trash (not entirely), the movie Oliver Stone began shooting in lower Manhattan 25 years ago this month has proved anything but disposable. Read more… Read more – ‘Gordon Gekko may be a problem for Mitt Romney [Los Angeles Times]’.
One of the most alarming “memory” films of recent years, Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s 2008 “Tony Manero” pondered the activities of a murderous madman living under martial law and obsessively impersonating the protagonist of “Saturday Night Fever.” Larraín’s follow-up, “Post Mortem,” is another dark, deadpan comedy that’s more overtly political and scarcely less disturbing. Read [...] Read more – ‘Larraín’s “Post Mortem”: Exhuming the Chile of 1973’.
Some people think Ebenezer Scrooge is— Well, he’s not. But guess who is … All Three Stooges! —Adam Sandler, “The Chanukkah Song” (1996) Personally, I’ve yet to meet anyone who mistook Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge for a Jew, but I get Adam Sandler’s point. Read more… Read more – ‘On the Three Stooges and “The Three Stooges” [Tablet]’.
A seething, phantasmagorical imbroglio even by Guy Maddin’s standards, “Keyhole” has something to do with a ’30s gangster (Jason Patric) whose mind is in an advanced state of disintegration. That the character is called Ulysses and is trying to find his way back home — or at least back to his bedroom — would seem [...] Read more – ‘On Guy Madden’s “Keyhole” [Artinfo]’.
Given that “Damsels in Distress” is the first Whit Stillman feature in the 14 years since “The Last Days of Disco” reveled in Studio 54 nostalgia, it’s almost impossible not to wish this essentially amiable project well. Intermittently witty and never exactly tiresome… Read more Read more – ‘On “Damsels in Distress” [Artinfo]’.
Part of our time? Herewith “some ruins and monuments of the thirties” that Murray Kempton’s book overlooked: “The Radical Camera,” a survey of the work of New York’s Photo League, a socially minded artists’ collective that was born in the New Deal and expired during the Cold War, explores two not unrelated historical artifacts. Read [...] Read more – ‘On “The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League” [Artforum]’.
Wafting into Dumbo’s reRun Gastropub Theater tonight for a week-long run, 29- year-old Mexican director Yulene Olaizola’s second feature “Paraisos Artificiales” [Artificial Paradises] is an exemplary situation documentary that employs one professional actor, Luisa Pardo, and a single location, Playa Jicacal, a jungle beach (apparently off season) in Veracruz, as the basis for an 83-minute [...] Read more – ‘Artificial Paradises’.
A nation must have its culture heroes, and current wisdom among Anglo-American movie critics and programmers has advanced Terence Davies, to the position of Britain’s greatest living filmmaker. Read more… Read more – ‘On Terence Davies [NYRBlog]’.
Clown prince of arrested development, maestro of coercive sentimentality: Is there a needier, more agonizingly ambitious figure in American popular culture than Jerry Lewis? The man doesn’t just want to make you laugh until you choke on your cookies and milk flows through your nose; he wants you to appreciate that he’s the greatest humanitarian [...] Read more – ‘Jerry Lewis at 86’.
Abel Ferrara, the cine scuzz-meister who set the bar for urban depravity with King of New York, then vaulted over it with the original Bad Lieutenant, is back home. 4:44 Last Day on Earth, opening Friday, is the End of the World on Delancey Street: In a loft above the Williamsburg Bridge, Willem Dafoe and [...] Read more – ‘On Abel Ferrara [New York magazine]’.
“It is interesting, even funny—or weird, perhaps—to imagine people sitting in an American cinema watching my movie.” So the Russian filmmaker Aleksei German mused when he first visited New York a dozen years ago for the local premiere of his once-shelved and now-revered Soviet “ nostalgia” film, My Friend Ivan Lapshin. Read more… Read more – ‘Aleksei German Among the Long Shadows [Film Comment 1999]’.
Although they seldom show a church or have a character call on Jesus, the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are the worker-priests of European art cinema. Twice presented the Palm d’or at Cannes (for “Rosetta” in 1999 and “L’enfant” in 2005), the Belgian duo have perfected a sort of spiritually-infused social realism. Read more… Read more – ‘On “The Kid on a Bike”’.
Footnote, the absurdist tragedy by New York-born, Israeli-raised Joseph Cedar, is a movie of such cosmic inconsequence that hyperbole is inevitable. So here goes: If immersing oneself in the history of the Jews is the essence of the Jewish condition, Footnote is the most Jewish movie since The Jazz Singer. Read more… Read more – ‘Prize Fighters: Footnote pits a Talmudic scholar against his academic son’.
“HYSTERICAL EXCESS: DISCOVERING ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI” is the film programmer’s equivalent of a banner headline. It’s not exactly misleading, but the subject of this BAMcinématek retrospective is definitely displeased. “ ‘Hysterical’ is a word I abhor,” Mr. Zulawski (zhoo-WOFF-skee) said when reached by telephone in Warsaw. Read more… Read more – ‘Food, Politics and Sex, Brought to a Boil’.
The jacket of Geoff Dyer’s “Zona” describes it as “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.” It is also a hall of mirrors in which the author watches himself watching (and remembers himself remembering) a movie that, according to his impressively detailed description, ends with a character looking at us, looking [...] Read more – ‘A Place of Our Deepest Desires’.
Is there a phrase more hackneyed than “the magic of the movies”? From the moment of their invention at the end of the 19th century, motion pictures have been perceived as simultaneously hyper natural and supernatural. Read more… Read more – ‘Hugo and the magic of film trickery’.
In the 52 years since Shelley Winters won a supporting actress Oscar for The Diary of Anne Frank, there have been 20 nominated features — including foreign-language and documentary films — that treated the Holocaust from the perspective of its victims. Only two have gone home unrewarded. Read more… Read more – ‘Perspective: Holocaust films and the Oscars’.
A lone lean figure strides purposefully through a dark tunnel, maybe a highway underpass. There’s no fear. A familiar husky voice whispers that “it’s half time—both teams are in their locker rooms, discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half.” One needn’t be a genius like Karl Rove to catch [...] Read more – ‘A New Obama Cinema’.
No one watches a movie in a vacuum. You don’t check your real-world baggage at the door — something for which any good critic must account. Several days before catching the new Steven Soderbergh action thriller “Haywire,” I learned that Soderbergh had made the movie on the rebound, fired from “Moneyball” on the eve of [...] Read more – ‘Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Haywire’ thinks as it fights’.
WAS ONCE, LONG LONG TIME AGO, great big Cold War joke—Russian claim to have invented lightbulb, radio transmitter, and even TV set. Also, to have developed feature-length 3-D movies shown without special glasses—which, in fact, they did! Read more… Read more – ‘No Man Is An Island: Aleksander Andriyevsky’s Robinzon Kruzo’.
From the scary thuds and mysterious roars that accompany the no-frills titles to the bizarrely poignant final image of the monster, alone at the bottom of the ocean, Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla is all business and pure dream… Read more – ‘Godzilla: Poetry After the A-Bomb’.
