The most controversial film at CineVegas equates spring break to Abu Ghraib.
Guy Maddin’s version of his hometown of Winnipeg is a dreamland patchwork of half truths and exaggerations, a standard-issue suburban incubator carved into blank screen fields of snow so blinding white they seem almost hot, on which Maddin has projected a secret life. He was commissioned to make My Winnipeg, an ostensible non-fiction portrait of [...]
This review first appeared in slightly different form during the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Operation Filmmaker opens in New York tomorrow.
As a portrait of post-Sadaam Iraqi youth, Operation Filmmaker doesn’t have the “wow!” factor of another recently released movie about Iraqi kids looking for refuge in American popular culture. But for a film that began [...]
This review originally appeared, in a slightly different form, during Sundance 2008. Bigger, Stronger, Faster* opens on six screens today.
A personal interrogative doc, more Morgan Spurlock than Doug Block, Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster uses his family’s experiences with steroids as the in point to tackle the larger roles of body perception, performance inhancement and [...]
Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues is a strange and beautiful little film, a potentially wispy slice of autobiography smartly elevated through irresistible, orgiastic style. The 82 minute feature cross cuts between the story of the director’s own divorce, and a loose retelling of the ancient Indian myth Ramayana; we’re led back and forth between [...]
More convincing as sex fantasy than political allegory, IRON MAN suggests the answer to combating Them is for Us to reestablish the link between mechanized killing and the body.
The reclusive author called the original Indiana Jones film “unwitty”, “unfunny” and “awful”.
April 29, 2008 – 12:01 am
The John Cusack “comedy” (generic term used loosely) gives anti-war filmmaking a bad name.
I saw six films at Tribeca this weekend, and five of them were completely blown off the map by Somers Town, Shane Meadows’ practically perfect follow-up to his 2007 triumph, This is England. England was one of my favorite films of last year, but its political/historical aims, admittedly, occasionally overwhelmed Meadows’ more subtle, character-based observations. [...]
The sequel arrives in theaters today accompanied by comparisons to The Empire Strikes Back, Being John Malkovich and Blazing Saddles.
