There is no way of sidestepping the issue, so why not jump right into it: Infamous, this year’s retelling of how Truman Capote wound up in Kansas writing his non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, never comes close to approaching the quiet, devastating brilliance of Capote, last year’s retelling of how…
The sex is real in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus; only the setting — an animated New York cityscape, benignly overseen by a fluorescent Statue of Liberty — is fake. To an extent, that describes the movie: a sexually daring, dramatically timid roundelay that employs unsimulated twosomes, threesomes and even solos…
Barry Levinson hasn’t made a movie of note in almost a decade — since 1997’s Wag the Dog, to be precise, and even that was less a work of substantial relevance than a bit of lucky timing based on someone else’s better novel. Granted, it had its moments — at…
“This is a curated program of the best of the best — lefty video nonsense, fun and frolic,” says Scott Beibin (right), host of the Lost Film Fest, which makes three local stops this week. Philadelphia-based Beibin, who also runs Bloodlink Records, co-founded the fest in 1999 and began taking…
Emilio Lobato and Martha Daniels. The solos that open the season at William Havu Gallery combine the disparate work of two of the area’s best-known and well-regarded artists. On the walls is Emilio Lobato: Desde Siempre (Since Forever), which comprises the artist’s signature abstractions. The title refers to Lobato’s self-exploration…
No studio director was a greater hero to the Hong Kong new wave than Martin Scorsese. John Woo dedicated The Killer to him; Wong Kar-wai modeled his first feature, As Tears Go By, after Mean Streets; and Taxi Driver’s rain-slicked slo-mo urban stylistics worked their way into countless lesser HK…
Among documentary muckrakers, Kirby Dick may not be as righteously indignant as Michael Moore or as brilliantly droll as Nick Broomfield, but say this for the maker and star of This Film Is Not Yet Rated: He’s not afraid to soil his hands to get the story. Rummaging through the…
Moving and ambitious in scale like nothing else in cinema, Michael Apted’s Up films began in 1964 as a BBC news program exploring an old Jesuit maxim: “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” Using interviews of fourteen randomly selected schoolchildren, Seven…
The animated feature has become the most tiresome dish available in the googolplex buffet line — more so than even the mopey art-house offering in which bad things happen to good people while string sections and Elliott Smith sound-alikes douse the soundtrack with dollops of calamity and sorrow. You can’t…
God is in the details no matter what you believe, but Jesus Camp is content to introduce its exposé of Christian youth indoctrination with shots of a fast-food- and flag-lined highway and the words “Missouri, USA.” Welcome to hell, kids. Missouri — yikes! — is among the holy lands of…
If Shocking Beyond Belief! Films’ latest flick, Here Come the Brides, is a reflection of society, you certainly don’t want to be straight. The couple portrayed is overbearing, pathetic andboring. The gays, however, get better food, better clothes, better parties. Plus, they get to corrupt the innocent straight boy in…
Emilio Lobato and Martha Daniels. The solos that open the season at William Havu Gallery combine the disparate work of two of the area’s best-known and well-regarded artists. On the walls is Emilio Lobato: Desde Siempre (Since Forever), which comprises the artist’s signature abstractions. The title refers to Lobato’s self-exploration…
Lewis Black: Red, White & Screwed(HBO) Like many other Daily Show success stories, Lewis Black is a comedian made for these times; his facial contortions and verbal tics are expressions of the Bush-era phrase “outrage overload.” But unlike other big names in political stand-up right now (David Cross, Bill Maher),…
Front-loaded with family discord, terminal cancer, prodigal jailbait, a cute kiddie looking for love, and other accessories of the ready-to-wear soap opera, Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is as heartfelt, sincere and soggy with nostalgia as some of his other periodic homages to the virtues of peasant…
There’s something comic — and a little spooky — about the sight of Kevin Costner in rubber flippers and a diving mask. Granted, it’s been more than a decade since the $180 million fiasco of Waterworld, but you’d think that an older, wiser, fleshier Costner would hesitate before so much…
A variant of what military leaders call “the fog of war” shrouds much of The Blood of My Brother, Andrew Berends’s unsettling and uncensored documentary about the effects of the American occupation in Iraq. In the film’s first scene, we behold a black-clad middle-aged Iraqi woman and her nineteen-year-old son…
Sweet, crazy and tinged with sadness, The Science of Sleep is a wondrous concoction. The tricksy romantic narrative — in which Gael García Bernal plays a hapless, Chaplinesque madman — may be reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Michel Gondry directed from Charlie Kaufman’s script. The look,…
Self-conscious aesthete, existential structuralist, one of the world’s most eloquent conjoiners of metaphysical mystery and sociopolitical critique, and a still-missed fallen soldier in the shrinking ranks of Euro art film, Krzysztof Kieslowski was only a well-known global figure for about six years before he died — beginning in 1989 with…
One would never confuse the work of writer-director Todd Phillips with that of the late Robert Hamer, whose filmography includes the essential Kind Hearts and Coronets. Hamer’s movies had a gentlemanly quality, no matter the cruelty that skulked beneath their prim exteriors; one always felt the characters in his movies,…
Emilio Lobato and Martha Daniels. The solos that open the season at William Havu Gallery combine the disparate work of two of the area’s best-known and well-regarded artists. On the walls is Emilio Lobato: Desde Siempre (Since Forever), which comprises the artist’s signature abstractions. The title refers to Lobato’s self-exploration…
The Big Animal (Milestone) It’s a simple yet lesser known law of comedy: Camels are always funny. There are the jaws that drool and chew side to side, the front legs that move like a human’s, the humps — but mostly it’s the eyes: There’s something of Buddha in a…
According to the publicity material for All the King¹s Men, bringing Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel of the same name to the screen again has always been “a cherished dream” of executive producer James Carville — suggesting a lurking sense of payback frustration with the insubstantial legacy of the real…
