You’re probably a lot like me thinking you’d come up with some bat shit crazy ideas if a production company were to come to you and say, “We’ll finance your movie, no matter how outrageous, no questions asked.” Without constraints, maybe you’d throw in a scene involving an older woman jamming anal beads up a…
One of the greatest fears of childhood is being abandoned by your parents and left to face the world alone. In A Brand New Life, winner of Best Asian Film Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival, French director Ounie Lecomte recalls her childhood in South Korea with this sensitively rendered and touching story of…
Christian Bale has used quite a few different voices throughout his career (this is the guy who actually made Batman sound like the complete opposite of alter ego Bruce Wayne), so when he shows up in Zhang Yimou’s Chinese drama The Flowers of War, I sort of half expected Bale to start speaking in Mandarin….
There is a difference between realistic films, such as those made by John Cassavetes, and cinema verité, or films that try to approximate realism. Realistic films know they are fiction, but nonetheless mimic reality for the sake of art, whereas cinema verité attempts to fool viewers into thinking it is real. Matteo Garrone’s 2008, 137…
Releasing a mindless war movie under the precedent that it’s “like no other in Hollywood’s history” was not the right way to convey reverence for our troops. While Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh’s Act of Valor shows respect for the men and women in uniform overseas, it ignores the complexities of their situation. Once intended…
As I write this, it’s raining in New York City. While this doesn’t necessarily correlate to the plot of Wanderlust, the new comedy helmed by David Wain, the director behind 2008’s “Role Models,” it had me thinking, “Was this the right weather to have watched such a sunny movie in?” Usually, I’m insecure about being…
Well it is mid-February and already my hope is that This Means War is the worst movie I will sit through all year. It’s a waste of talent and utterly senseless . . . which would be fine if it happened to be funny as advertised. Instead, the screenwriters — Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg…
