Reviews

After the epic and vaunted "Dogtooth," Yorgos Lanthimos recollects his sangfroid and regroups in Cincinnati to channel afresh the deeply dysfunctional archetypal relationships he knows. He here uses to fine effect a number of subtle filmmaker tricks to evoke a genuine, primitive sense of dread. 7 stars and not 8 or 9, however, because like a Peter Greenaway film, this one resonates and resonates with itself, turning in on itself like salt water taffy, without ever reaching authentic resolution or explication. Certain scenes have such bloodless coldness and unnecessariness as to make life seem garish and bleak. Celebration of life warts and all, self-discrepant though it generally is, would seem to be an ironic ubermotif in Lanthimos' oeuvre, but that thread runs thin here and then vanishes, no greenroom with champagne in it for anyone. Or is that too his point? Distilled acting from Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan. I'm ready for Nicole Kidman to retire her nude filmic self.

I wonder if I saw the same film on which plaudits have been heaped by critics. At hand is a war narrative told on an Emily Dickensian slant that refuses to trifle with toothy commodities like character development, storyline, protagonist or climax. CGI is dodged to make room for soul and authenticity in this film, but soul forgot to audition. Extreme budgetary considerations went into creating authentic air and sea battle depictions, and nuanced lenswork is on hand with a shrewdly deployed color palate, but the film is no more endearing than a cold limp handshake.

While Charlize Theron is in fine form and as ready for action as Jennifer Garner at her best, would-be scintillating performances from lofty talent like John Goodman, James McAvoy and Toby Keith wither in the film can. The 80s disco dance tune soundtrack never manages to congeal this film into narrative totality or wholeness. Much impressive and fine action is on display, but edited with frosty detachment verging on disinterest...and an extra camera angle or two thrown in to foment the violence would better engage viewers. Segments of good narrative try to take flight here, but never achieve altitude. The viewer tries to bond with Theron's strong lead character but the presumptuous production values, pacing, cutting style and vague borrowings from other genres (Bond, Bourne, Le Carre epics,, Eastwood, "The Departed") keep this film from ever becoming its own thing. A re-edit from start to finish could make this film considerably more compelling. Otherwise, meh. This blonde may be atomic, but critical mass is never achieved and fission never occurs.

Some people shouldn't direct. Gerard Depardieu stars in this claptrap revenge drama set in his new home nation of Russia, a hamfisted dreck movie in which English is spoken badly (as in bad acting) by all except for Elizabeth Hurley, who is lovely and ostensibly the only cast member with a pulse here. It's poorly shot, poorly lit, with some scenes made patently awful by the fact that Depardieu is sightreading lines inanely from cuecards. His English is famously poor and that is on frank display here. People may be drawn to this film because Russia is on our minds now, and may even think it will have some of the intrigue of "Eastern Promises." Be warned and stay away. Scene continuity is lousy and the storyline too generic to trifle with. How about some real editing? How about some DIRECTING to make this seem like something other than an appalling readthrough? Two stars instead of one merely because of Hurley. Serious moviegoers will be deeply offended by "Viktor," the only film I've even seen that seems to have been all shot in a single awful take.

The male half of this film is offal, while the female part is numinal and transcendent. Young males visit Europe and have problems with women, and these characters never rise above the level of offensive louts in parts not well written. The centerpiece of the film is the advent of 20-year-old Frederikke Dahl Hansen, here playing a 14-year- old girl. Hansen's character is not a sexpot, but her husky, erratic voice (does she have spasmodic dysphonia) endears her to males, as does her kindness, freedom, clarity of thought and astuteness. She pedals carefree around Copenhagen in loud-green pants. Her moment of karaoke singing in a bar reveals her soulfulness, her sincerity, her tender heart. Male viewers react to this by feeling protective of Hansen, and cherishing this role. Why the part calls for her to be 14 doesn't scan except perhaps to convey that her childlike innocence can bring out the best in men.

Matches here are a metaphor for undistinguished short lives, and work well to propel Aki Kaurismaki's sere, reductionist story. He clearly works well with lead actress Kati Outinen, and the predictability of the tale is deliberate so as to force the viewer to confront the unsaturated colors, the paint that needs re-doing, the absence of empathy, the rarity of anything in the lead character's life to cling to or believe in. While themes, aesthetics and behaviors on display here are characteristically Nordic, Kaurismaki's manner, set-ups, and potent understatement are his alone and in top-shelf form. One wants a larger oeuvre from him.

What's not to like about this early Wim Wenders road-genre film? It's an operatic overture in which he sets out the themes, the provenance, the pacing we will see again in again...in "Goalie," in "Paris, Texas," even in "Wings of Desire." The atmospherics are perfect, and I could watch a 40-hour miniseries in this vein. The final 35mm print is bogged down now and again in graininess from blow-ups of the original 16mm negative, but the characters are flesh and blood, credible, and well- played. Alice's interaction with the protagonist's guiding male penumbra is nuanced, relieving, and something a post-modern film could never achieve. The older I get the more I cherish and cling to Wenders' early work: more worldly than you think, and a zero-tolerance zone for cynicism.

"Dying of the Light" interests viewers for all of the first 10 minutes; then its light goes out. The premise is claptrap and formulaic, and the storyline has gaudy seams badly concealed. I'm not sure if Cage was badly directed or his own personal misfortunes have left him bereft of the ability to be emotionally labile on camera, but his character is supposedly mood-unstable on the basis of frontotemporal dementia; his "spells" with this do not serve the plot at all, and come across as hackwork. I come away with the sense that the film was lensed with care but then butchered in post-production by digital deracination because the studio wanted a pablum film to placate hoi polloi. A big favor you can do yourself is not wasting two hours of your life on this ridiculous drably-executed movie.

"A History of Violence" is a film with no generalizable theme, no deeper meaning, no point worth mining it for. It mostly works as a vehicle for depicting plenty of violence, particularly lurid face punches and graphic gut-splattering shotgun blasts...a wheelbarrow of gruesome ephemera. It's tough to discern whether Mortensen's part is too lightly written or just underperformed. The film's grotesque opening passage only serves to anoint the viewer with blood in a way the director feels needs to be done to establish the right downwardly mobile aesthetic mood. Maria Bello's character is human and well- played, but somehow doesn't belong here. Not a film I recommend....I resent having paid anything to watch it, and will not do so again.

"The Demon" is a stark, deeply-felt film relatively unknown in the West and one that often flows and feels like Ingmar Bergman directing a quintessentially Japanese story. The customary strains and strictures of modern Japanese life backstop the viewer, and if one single character functions as the title, which character that is requires active collaboration from the viewer. I was concerned the story arc might wax soap-operatic, but it doesn't. "The Demon" is sensitively- directed, and its characters defy pigeonholing. The iconic imagery of the baffled, buffeted, confused children stuns. "The Demon" belongs in the pantheon of really great movies about family pathology like Lanthimos's "Dogtooth" and Bergman's "Cries and Whispers." The Criterion Collection release is a crackerjack edition.

I first saw "Frogs" when I was 11, when Joan Van Ark gave me crush-like feelings and Sam Elliott seemed a role model. I liked the horror vibe, the snakes, alligators, lizards and frogs, and the death, as well as the creepy vibe of the implied southern coastal humid island madness. It made me think at the time of a pop song called "Swamp Witch." But "Frogs" doesn't hold up to re-watching. Its seams abound, and its shooting is nearly as hapless as its editing. It made money in spades for producers, but that is mainly because of a shoestring budget rather than being smashing at box offices. I cannot watch it now, however, without being ever-aware at every moment how much better it could have been with just a few re-takes, a few better set-ups, and some pleats in the script. It may help baby-boomers revisit their youth, but otherwise lacks virtues to recommend it.

This remake of the Gregory Peck/Lee Remick original is a point-by-point event-by-event facelift of a finely chilling movie that in no way needs remaking and which is best left alone. Neither the script, producers nor the director find anything remotely fresh to wring from the story arc, whose execution is drably formulaic, a somnambulistic walkthrough of the original film's script. The considerable abilities of Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles never take flight because of no opportunities to do so. "The Omen" 2006 is told with no conviction and no enthusiasm, with also-ran shooting and editing. It's the most phoned-in waste-of-time film I have seen in several years.

"Cannibal" summons to mind vague storyline similarities with Patrice Leconte's moody 1990 film "Monsieur Hire" and James Hamilton- Paterson's roman a clef "Loving Monsters."

Protagonist Carlos is a revered tailor in Granada, Spain, who murders and cannibalizes beautiful young women, and ostensibly does so in a way unencumbered by sadism or sexuality. His monotonic cannibalism is never explained, and left as metaphorical vehicle. Horror is not on offer here, and viewers are left free to imbue Carlos's predilection with personal meaning: in other ways, Carlos is fair, just, and honorable. Do even the very best among us have equally abhorrent gaping erroneous zones?

Romanian actress Olimpia Melinte's fresh-faced, highly-abled and confident screen presence work well in two roles here. Mise en scene, vistas and pacing are lovely, and the languid takes, the confident exposition, the story's ability to achieve both enormity and enormousness with an economy of lines and set-ups, make "Cannibal" well worth immersing in.

Among a panoply of scintillating things about this film is Sergei Urusevsky's deft black-and-white cinematography, much of it hand-held. Urusevsky seems to understand semiotics deeply, and his shots are often protean, shifting angle or perspective during a take to wring extra emotional import from it. I found myself rewinding many sequences and rewatching because of how well Urusevky, arguably the greatest Soviet era lensman, can minimally change vantage or tilt and bring fresh meaning cascading from the actors.

"Letter Never Sent" has communistic political messages in it, but is sumptuously acted by a small cast with a good sense of ensemble. Heat and cold, fire and ice, land and water, remote wildness and safe civilization all exist here in dynamic tension. The version in digital circulation is lovingly restored. A must-watch, especially for admirers of other quintessential Russian filmmakers such as Tarkovsy.

I saw this film in Taipei upon its release, and without subtitles. The story elaborates itself brilliantly through universal imagery, exceptional acting, very nice cinematography with a rich color palette. It's told in vignettes of cruelty that depict Chinese women in extraordinary fits of suffering and grief inflicted by men. In one, a woman who is hungry prepares food for men, but is forbidden from eating it alongside them, and is made to suffer when she makes her needs known. Her grief leaps off the screen, or so it seems. Although life in an older Asian clime is depicted, the storyline never lapses into parochialism. This film affects viewers quite deeply, and though the story arc is feminist, no stridency is on hand. It's about females crying out for mere modicums of empathy and parity.

"The Passion of Anna" is an early color effort by Bergman with him and his customary troupe of actors at their creative best. This film has Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow in absolute top form, early in their arcs of greatness, at once with vast creative powers but also here in full command of them. Meta-film digressions, as asides with the actors, allow Bergman to wield his tropes in new ways. Nykvist and Bergman at times feel bombast with the new power imparted by color stock, as with Ullmann's sidebar in a blazing orange hat. Nykvist's generally arch visual style is foregone here for a more common touch Ozu medium-shot approach. While most will recognize Bergman themes, motifs and styles, Bergman mostly does not plagiarize Bergman here; he does self-quote in a sequence that features a statue that appeared in "Persona." This fine film will bring aesthetic frissons to most viewers, and deserves re-watching. The warm color palette adumbrates great things to come in "Cries and Whispers."

Rodrigo Cortes has all the makings of an auteur. "Red Lights" really puts the hook in viewers, and is hard to stop watching once it gets going. You get the feeling Cortes is quite enthusiastic, just dying to tell you this yarn. His script is well-written, intelligent, and never bamboozles. Elisabeth Olsen is incandescent, and the performances from all the leads have them in top form. Some may criticize the film as being overproduced: many sequences are bursting forth with camera angles and takes, and these combined with Cortes's fulminating style of editing sometimes give the film the feel of "Desperate Hours." But I loved this film, loved the color palette, loved the patois and exposition, and admire Cortes's confident bombast. Great things are coming from this filmmaker.

"Devil's Knot" has gotten a lukewarm reception from audiences and this is ill-deserved. The film is a perfect-pitch plainsong retelling of the case of the West Memphis Three. Atom Egoyan is a master of understated film-making, but perfectly depicts the aura, atmosphere, cultural inclinations and Bible-belt provincial biases of the participants without being garish. Marvelous performances from Reese Witherspoon, Bruce Greenwood,Colin Firth and several others are on view here. Mireille Enos's lightning-catching turn as Vicki Hutcheson, in which she brilliantly channels uneducated de classe white-trash coarseness, is worth sitting through the entire film. The esteem in which this competent film is held will grow with time.

"The Burmese Harp" meditates brilliantly on comradeship, killing, surcease from killing, guilt, remorse and reverence for the dead. From early in his career, this supple and nuanced story discloses Ichikawa to have a subtle mind that operated on many levels. Ichikawa's outsize talent would soon be declared in full force by "Fires on the Plain." This film broods on horror that one man tries to stop, and cannot, and spends the rest of his life in penance for. The story arc celebrates Buddhist thinking, and has such universal themes of guilt, commitment, personal accountability, isolation and shame that it could be transposed well to another place and time. Ichikawa's film occasionally tear-jerks, and some of the musical digressions could be trimmed, but "The Burmese Harp" is anchored by a deft human touch and a pervasive sense of ethnicity-transcending universality. Minoru Yokoyama, the cinematographer, has lovingly lensed this film with an attitude of creating iconography, which he has. Shoji Yasui's performance as Mizushima is one in which muses ever sing.

"Adore" is generally stultifying and implausible. Though based on a Doris Lessing story, the story arc seems to come from somewhere beyond that of Diane Kurys's 1983 masterpiece "Entre Nous" with Isabelle Huppert. Two blonde Australian women who are lifelong friends find themselves deeply planted in middle age and sleeping with each other's sons. One wonders whether this is a type of emotional lesbianism by proxy or whether it is an indictment of the formulations of female self-esteem, craving, as the leads seem to, male attention at any price. The male characters of this film are cardboard cut-outs. The story takes on incest overtones and yet still bores. The otherwise exceptional Naomi Watts barely inhabits her role, and every opportunity for the finding of meaning and depth in this movie is one the filmmakers either miss or trip over.

Coppola's take on the Stoker idiom will compel you to watch again and again, as this film is so masterful and ingenious that even its flaws become attributes like the errors woven into fine Persian rugs. Oldman was born to play the ambivalent, eternal count, here sometimes depicted as a near-Eastern wise man. Coppola wryly uses the film as a quotation device for other fine tellings of Dracula, such as in the scenes in which Oldman as Dracula jack-in-the-boxes out of coffins (riffing on Max Schreck in "Nosferatu"). The film's HIV metaphors work brilliantly, and Anthony Hopkins' occasionally off-kilter Van Helsing provides welcome comic relief. Keanu Reaves's performance as Jonathan Harker is dunderheaded enough to be oddly endearing. Michael Ballhaus's cinematography is an utter profusion of saturated colors with semiotic significance, and the old-style matte and optical special effects make CGI seem stagey, acerbic and bloodless by comparison. This may be the best art-directed film ever to come out of Hollywood, and Eiko Ishioka's costumes burn messages and motifs into the unconscious. Cary Elwes, Richard Grant, and Billy Campbell play an odd troika of unlike fellows who find thrilling common cause in fighting Dracula. Coppola features two fine debut turns from women whose performances seem larger than life: Sadie Frost as the vibrant but vulnerable Lucy, and Monica Bellucci as a lovely but fiendishly eroticized Dracula bride. Tom Waits stuns as Renfield. A resounding, enthusiastic and bombastic 10 stars.

This potential gem directed by and starring Bruce Lee is flawed by appalling technical quality that restoration cannot fix. Early sequences in the film are dogged by out-of-focus shooting, perhaps from a camera with a backfocus problem. The chromatic characteristics of the film stock appeal, but much of the imaging is just ratty, grainy and murky. The dubbing is inanely bad. Lee emerges as a noble star prepossessed with themes of taking on badness and vanquishing it, and a climactic fight sequence is well-choreographed and performed. The story is set in Rome and seems imbued with vague spaghetti Western themes, and these are hackneyed enough to dim Lee's rising star. But as a piece of art that rounds out Lee's repertoire, divulges more about his mystique while commanding respect, and has some highly stagecrafted, riveting, engaging sequences, this film certainly deserves watching.

"On The Job" is jarringly excellent, with a brilliant ensemble cast playing interwoven and well-developed characters in a brilliantly lensed and thoroughgoingly scripted gritty underworld drama. Although this film is about nihilistic ways that are dark, one thrills to watch the creative accomplishments of artists so powerful and so effortlessly in mastery of their prowess as are on display here. "On The Job" is the strongest film of its kind since Hector Babenco's brilliant "Pixote." The bleakness has the redemptive and cathartic power of "Breaking Bad" and if this isn't the best film ever from the Philippines, the Filipino film that trumps it must be unimaginably good. I was spellbound, rapt, entranced, and find myself driven to re-watch "On The Job."

A film so exceptionally asinine as to have no redeeming attributes at all. This is a story whose main characters are the lead actress's breasts with implants, which appear in most scenes. Rabid prison girls in heat...that's the gist of the story, but this achieves nothing credit-worthy in the way "Caged Heat" once did. The plot is insulting, the script a joke, the character motivations implausible, and no scene does not insult the viewer. It's quite difficult to imagine any viewer finishing this nonsensical effort. This is soft-core porn, but even most such films of that genre have something to redeem them. Nothing redeems "Jailbait."