Writer/director Lance Hammer’s debut feature Ballast is one of those loosely plotted films that reveal themselves slowly and almost obliquely. Who the characters are and how they’re related comes across subtly and the story seems to manifest itself almost out of nothing. As such, it would be robbing the film of some of its pleasure [...]
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Popular comedies are a tricky business. If they’re too quirky, they’re liable to limit themselves to a niche audience. Smooth off too many rough edges however, and they risk turning to cinematic sponge cake — formless, lifeless and lacking in character.
Occasionally a comedy will hit a sweet spot where it satisfies expectations yet remains edgy [...]
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Co-written and directed by Ed Harris from a novel by Robert B. Parker and starring Harris and Viggo Mortensen, Appaloosa is almost a throwback to the old B-westerns. It’s not a cheap film or one of low production quality, but it’s a simple, almost intimate story rather than one with the epic or mythic pretentiousness [...]
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Feihong Yu and Henry O in Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
(photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)
On the surface, director Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a simple story about an elderly father who comes from China to America to help his adult daughter through a divorce. Underneath, it’s a bit [...]
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John Malkovich dictates his ‘memwahs’ in Burn After Reading
They are two brothers who have a knack for combining genres and styles into hybrids that can only be described by using their last name as an adjective. Their films are set in a recognizable approximation of reality, but certain elements have been tweaked and exaggerated. Unexpected [...]
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Summer Bishil and Aaron Eckhart in Towelhead
My hatred of Towelhead set in early and I never shook it. I think it was the scene at the airport where Maria Bello’s Bad Mother character is shipping poor confused daughter Jasira (Summer Bishil) off to live with her Lebanese father in Houston after the Creepy Live-In Boyfriend [...]
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Brian Cox in Red
Brian Cox (Rushmore, Zodiac) is Avery Ludlow, a quiet, sensible man living alone with his old dog Red in a big, out of the way house in rural Oregon. The film begins more than a decade after the tragic loss of his wife and son and Avery has mostly put his life [...]
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Penélope Cruz in Elegy
Based on Philip Roth’s novel The Dying Animal, Isabel Coixet’s romantic drama Elegy stars Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh, a college literature professor who spent the sexual revolution of the ’60s married. Eventually abandoning his wife and son, he spent the ensuing years making up for lost time, jumping from one woman [...]
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Kim Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts as we meet them in Trouble the Water
One sign of a good documentary filmmaker is the ability to shift gears and abandon preconceived notions when a story changes unexpectedly. In the case of Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, the story that became their hurricane Katrina documentary Trouble the Water [...]
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Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson in Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Like a fleeting love affair in a beautiful foreign country, Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona is probably best appreciated for what it is rather than analyzed for what it means. It’s a bit of a trifle to be sure, but a supremely engaging and entertaining one. More [...]
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Seth Rogen, James Franco and Danny R. McBride take the Pineapple Express
On first viewing, the true measure of a comedy is how much it makes you laugh. If you laugh enough, you’re able to forget whatever other flaws it might have. If the laughs stop however, the movie underneath better deliver in some other way [...]
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Misty Upham and Melissa Leo in Frozen River
Melissa Leo is Ray Eddy, a working mother living in rural upstate New York. Raising two sons, a 5-year-old and a 15-year old, she’s married but her husband is a gambling addict. As the movie begins, he has run off with the money she’d set aside for a [...]
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1.5 laughs
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Image ©2008 Jean-Louis Blondeau / Polaris Images
“If I die, what a beautiful death. To die in the exercise of your passion.” - Philippe Petit
“It was so beautiful. It was like he was walking on a cloud.” - Annie Allix
It’s difficult to watch a man walking a tightrope between the two towers of New York’s World [...]
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High school senior Hannah Bailey in American Teen
In 2005, filmmaker Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture) filmed the lives of five Warsaw Indiana High School seniors over the course of ten months. She then narrowed down 1000 hours of footage and the result is American Teen, a documentary that traces every up and [...]
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