A poignant love story, Arnaud Desplechin’s (“Jimmy P.”) My Golden Days (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse) is filled with warmth and humor and delivered with a lively and playful touch in the Desplechin style: The use of voice-overs, split screens, the iris-effect, and characters looking and speaking directly into the camera. Challenging us with numerous…
Babbling in a bubble. Like babbling in a bubble. No wise words. No intelligible ideas. Only an interminable babble of three carton-cut characters living in the little bubble that this film provides. Watching Wasp is like listening to an irrelevant insect buzzing around without it becoming anything but a mild nuisance in the background. The…
Heartstrings are tugged quite relentlessly in Lee Whittaker’s hyperbolically dark and dingy drama Catching Fireflies, but perhaps to touching effect. Whittaker has some very slick tools in his filmmaking arsenal and so he successfully crams a lot of style and technically ambitious tricks into the compact 19 minute running time, while convincingly depicting the hellishly…
Clumsy action thriller Momentum may as well be retitled “Further Proof That Morgan Freeman Will Star in Anything.” The towering talent who has played everyone from Robin Hood’s sidekick to God is cinematically ubiquitous and yet has long since remained respectable while slipping deeper into embarrassing paycheck territory. One has to think that the reason…
Everybody is fine in Every Thing Will Be Fine. This is a title that lives up to its expectations. They’re all fine . . . just fine: Actors, cinematographer, production designer, sound mixer, editor, writer . . . filmmaker. And it would be all relatively okay were this not a Wim Wenders’ movie. It’s been…
Winner of the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s (“Flight of the Red Balloon”) first film in eight years, The Assassin (Nie yin niang), may initially seem out of character for a director whose previous work has been in realistic social dramas set in a contemporary historical context. Yet it is…
For 350 years, Spain built a vast empire in South America based on the labor and exploitation of the Indian population, forcing them to accept Christianity while decimating their culture, religion, and even their language. In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, “rubber barons” rounded up all the Indians and forced them to tap…
