Whether you like him or not, Lars von Trier certainly knows how to push the boundaries of what many consider bad taste. And just by looking at the title of his latest effort, Nymphomaniac, audiences should quickly realize he has no plans of slowing down. Reuniting with the controversial director is Charlotte Gainsbourg (“Antichrist“) in…
It’s only because I have brother-love for Arnold Schwarzenegger that I’m giving his latest, Sabotage, any attention. In it he leads a band of highly trained DEA agents — the last resort kind — that deliver justice to those too powerful to be taken down by ordinary means. After a particularly nasty raid against a…
At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, patients were advised to wait. In the six years following the first recording of the AIDS outbreak in 1981, more than 40,000 people in the U.S. died while waiting. In response to the clamor for action on the AIDS crisis, then Vice President George…
Paul (Yvan Attal) is a portrait of dishevelment in the opening scene of Phillipe André’s interesting short, Delicate Gravity. Sitting in a Vietnamese restaurant, the pages of the book he’s translating splayed across the table, his hair unkempt, Paul tells us a lot before he even says a word. We’re introduced to the guy during…
The fate of a newborn baby is the central focus of the movingly melancholic drama Hatch, but the child essentially adopts the role of emotional McGuffin throughout a narrative that digs deeper in its adult exploration of responsibility. Eschewing sentimentality for a plaintive poignancy, writers Karl Goldblat and Christoph Kuschnig (who also directed) divide the…
Though Blue is the Warmest Color, winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, contains graphic depictions of sex, it is not a voyeuristic exercise but a complex, deeply intense film that elevates one young woman’s personal struggle into a drama of universal relevance. Adapted by Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix from the…
One man’s harrowing journey through a personalized hell has been the focus of each of Steve McQueen’s three features, but never has the metaphor been so effectively explored by the filmmaker as it is in his deeply moving fact-based drama 12 Years a Slave. McQueen’s penchant for precisely pointed perspective is applied again here, but…
