Tweet Surveillance – Jennifer Chambers Lynch A sick movie – in a sick genre. Do not be conned by the publicity for this sleazeball movie: it is not a thriller. It is a horror movie pretending to be a thriller. The essence of the horror movie for me is that the tension, the suspense, arises […]
Filed under: 1 star, Horror, Jennifer C Lynch, Philosophical | No Comments »
Tweet Gran Torino – Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry got to be old. And mean. I guess we expected that. Curmudgeonly, cranky, rollie-smoking, beer-drinking – a can and by-the-neck man, nary a glass in sight – ex-Korean War vet Walt Kowalski isn’t actually cop Harry Callaghan, just a kind of alter ego ‘with-no-name’ grown old, prejudices […]
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Tweet Slumdog Millionaire – Danny Boyle Slumdog Millionaire is like a shot of bad tequila – feels great as it goes down then begins to burn at your gut and eventually makes you feel queasy. ‘Slumdog’, for it already has an abbreviated nickname; is a nice, naïve, pacy little romantic fairytale knocked up inexpensively by […]
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Tweet The Reader – Stephen Daldry This is a morally complex film: which probably explains why it has polarised critical opinion. The Reader demonstrates better than any recent film I can remember, the vital importance of what the viewer brings to the artistic experience – both to the quality of that experience and the value […]
Filed under: 4 stars, Europe/World cinema, Extended essay, Philosophical, Political, Romance, Stephen Daldry, Thriller, War | No Comments »
Tweet Che – Steven Soderbergh The essence of art is selection: and the logic of selection defines what is left out. The collaborative nature of the art of film-making increases the need for such eliminating decisions exponentially – casting, screenplay, lighting, angle, editing, music, sound and thousands of other decisions. The result is not the […]
Filed under: 3 star, Director, Drama, Extended essay, Historical, Hollywood, Philosophical, Political, Stephen Soderberg, War | No Comments »
Tweet Gommora – Matteo Garrone Thomas Hobbes, 16th Century English philosopher once described human life without government, state authority, as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Garrone’s award-winning film occupies a Hobbesian world: neither his Direction nor Maurizio Braucchi’s screenplay, based upon Roberto Saviano’s whistle-blowing book Gomorra (2006), make any attempt at a coherent narrative […]
Filed under: 4 stars, Action, Drama, Europe/World cinema, Gangster, General, Matteo Garrone, Philosophical, Political | No Comments »
Tweet Lemon Tree – Eran Riklis At the very heart of this quiet, dignified film is a performance by Israeli-Arab Hiam Abbass of such power and stillness that it not only draws us into the pain and mental anguish of poor Palestinian widow Salma Zidane, but also resonates with the ancient Israeli/Palestinian conflict for which […]
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Tweet Changeling – Clint Eastwood Cinema, film is a collaborative art. If the director has the integrating artistic conception of the film, he still has to assemble his realisation of that ‘vision’ through the many critical disciplines, each an art in its own right, that provide the warp and weft of the finished film. It […]
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Tweet Pride And Glory – Gavin O’Connor Barack Obama’s election to the Presidency is likely to influence American society in profound but as yet unpredictable ways. It will be fascinating to see how Hollywood embraces the new New World. Which director in which film with whose screenplay will be the first to portray deep racial […]
Filed under: 3 star, Action, Detective, Drama, Extended essay, Gangster, Gavin O'Connor, General, Hollywood, Philosophical, Political | No Comments »
Tweet The New World – Terence Malik Critical response to this movie beggars belief. If he had just made the dullest movie ever (people walked out of my showing), Malik could be forgiven. But this empty, patronising, sentimentalised farrago of historic lies is scandalously ethnocentrically, totally white European. It perpetuates the worst form of a […]
Filed under: 1 star, Drama, General, Historical, Hollywood, Philosophical, Romance, Terence Malik | No Comments »
