reviews

Filmmaker John G. Young won festival awards with his first film, Parallel Sons, but he was having a helluva time getting his second film produced. So finally he decided to do it himself, and shot The Reception in eight days, in just a few locations, for $5,000. In most cases, that’d be a disclaimer, a … more…

Right off the bat, we’re assaulted by Glenn Close’s Broadway diva, who rages to her master class of wannabe thespians how we’re none of us passionate anymore, how we substitute iced mochachinos for emotion, or some such hotheaded nonsense. So of course you know instantly that the film’s title is going to refer to emotional … more…

A bloodbath set to “Free Bird.” A slo-mo shootout whereby insanely driven cops and against intensely sociopathic serial killers square off. A comic interlude in which the relative merits of Groucho Marx and Elvis Presley as entertainers are debated. If you’ve seen death-rocker Rob Zombie’s debut film, the perfunctory would-be shocker House of 1,000 Corpses, … more…

It’s as wildly uneven as your cousin’s wedding — some of it is a blast, some of it wallows in ridiculous sentimentality, some of it is just dull — but your cousin’s wedding didn’t feature the tag team of Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. These guys are two of my favorite performers today, Wilson (The … more…

Ya gots yer indie movies that are self-consciously ‘hip’ and tediously self-aware and go to great lengths of easy oddity to avoid getting themselves labeled ‘mainstream,’ and in the process they end up like something that came off an assembly line of quirk, like you might find them in the Spencer Gifts at the mall where the nonconformist kids all flock to conform to one another. And then ya gots yer films that are truly art: uncomfortable in the incisiveness of their observations, aggressively attuned to the ordinary in such a way as to make you desperately wish they didn’t make you acknowledge how boring and depressing and lonely we all tend to be even when we’re pretending we aren’t.

Of course it’s silly and slippery with innards and fluids and the kinds of squishy grossouts you expect from a zombie horror comedy, but there’s also, in this low-budget Australian import, an oddly poignant attempt to redeem a hackneyed genre from pointless insensitivity. When the walking dead overrun a small fishing village, the local beauty … more…

Well, whatever you do, don’t pop into *Dark Water* if you’re in a lowdown, lousy mood and you’re looking for The Movies to supply a pick-me-up. Cuz one of the things this Asian-horror remake does really well is create the blackest of black moods right from its opening moments, and then deepens it and explores it and toys with it as if it’s trying to see just how despairing and miserable it can make you feel. Go into the flick already in a state of despair and misery, and you just might end up coming out in a straitjacket.

In between his gloriously Zen Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… And Spring and his urban Goldilocks fairy tale 3-Iron, Korean filmmaker Ki-duk Kim made this arcane and provocative film… and it cements his reputation as one of the most astonishing artists working in cinema today. Rage and forgiveness, castigation and redemption are the four extreme corners … more…