Killer timing! Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), Jason Kohn’s vivid, lean, and hungry documentary about São Paulo’s fatalistic food chain of extreme poverty, violence, unmitigated corruption, and overwhelming wealth arrived last month just as Vanity Fair’s “Viva Brazil!” issue hit the stands. Can’t we find a new country to fetishize?…
The estranged brothers Whitman have reunited for a journey on the Darjeeling Limited, a colorful old train traversing the Rajasthan region of India. Along the way, they will stop to visit temples (“Probably one of the most spiritual places on Earth!”) and shop for souvenirs (slippers, cobras, pepper spray), with…
It will, no doubt, be said time and again of Michael Clayton: best John Grisham adaptation ever. Except, of course, it did not spring from the billion-dollar mind of the attorney who turned into a franchise, but from Tony Gilroy, who made his big-screen bow 15 years ago as the…
Calling all pundits. It’s a baffling caprice of the zeitgeist to have two studio Westerns released in the same season, 30-odd years after the genre basically gave up the ghost. James Mangold’s better-than-competent and highly crowd-pleasing 3:10 to Yuma has provided a harmonica fanfare for something more ambitious and polarizing…
“Will you leave your kingdom to a heretic?” That was the question posed to a dying Queen Mary in 1998’s Elizabeth, director Shekhar Kapur’s grim and dingy film now viewed in retrospect as the origin story of a superhero: The Armored Virgin Queen, faster than a speeding lead pellet, more…
“Beautiful” and “cruel” — that’s how director Ang Lee describes Eileen Chang’s 1979 short story about obsessive love and effortless betrayal in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, a tale upon which Lee has based his epic-length Lust, Caution. Writing in the afterword to a recently republished version of the 54-page story, which took…
“This is a mockumentary, right?” I’ve been asked that question at least a dozen times since The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters made its bow at the Slamdance Film Festival in January. Quite simply, some folks just don’t believe that Seth Gordon’s film about two men vying for…
To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away…
After Hair, Hairspray, and the mass marketing of tie-dye, can the ’60s be shrunk to fit any further? Yes, indeed, here comes Julie Taymor to run the revolutions of sex, class, and race through the PG-13 sieve. Not that one turns to musicals for deep thought, but John Waters at…
The Kingdom is the first film from Peter Berg since the actor-turned-director’s Friday Night Lights, which spawned an acclaimed, if struggling, franchise for NBC. There will be no small-screen spin-off of The Kingdom — there are too many corpses lying around to populate a sequel, much less a series. Besides,…
So here’s this Arab actor talking to me in Hebrew about his role as a Saudi soldier in Peter Berg’s The Kingdom — which ought to be enough cultural confusion to throw anyone, let alone someone just cruising onto the radar of an industry not known for casting Middle Eastern…
Even the most adamantly anti-war movies about American soldiers returning from Vietnam — Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978) and Oliver Stone’s Born on the 4th of July (1989) — redeemed their mangled, embittered grunts through the love of good women, devoted parents, political resistance, or all of the above. You…
I’ve said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation. From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run. A rhapsodic movie…
Until 2005, Richard Shepard’s was a lamentable direct-to-prop-plane filmography populated with such forgettable titles as Cool Blue, Oxygen, Mexico City, and The Linguini Incident, the latter of which was a heist film most notable for pairing David Bowie and Buck Henry — and that’s not even a punch line. For…
In the first few minutes of Eastern Promises, the striking new thriller from David Cronenberg, a throat is sliced, a uterus hemorrhages, and a newborn baby, slimy and palpitating, emerges from the womb of its dead mother. None of which comes as much of a surprise from the maker of…
The exemplary achievements of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival succeeded by one of two means: narrowing the gap between author and subject in pursuit of intimate effects, or else working distance into the material and profiting from the vantage. Contemporary neorealism at its most confident and alert, Chop Shop…
In Neil Jordan’s new movie, Jodie Foster plays New York talk-radio personality Erica Bain, who survives a vicious Central Park mugging and becomes an urban crusader devoted to cleaning up the city — with a Glock instead of a broom. Yes, The Brave One is that movie: the one with…
For an issue-oriented doc with activist aims, the line between hope and despair — between placating an outraged audience and calling it to action — is a fine one, indeed. Any indie auteur feels tempted to salute grassroots heroism, his own not least, although the promise of “making a difference”…
Diary of the Dead offers another way to say “I love zombies.” Late at night, alone in the woods, a group of film students at work on a no-budget horror film called The Death of Death are interrupted by — the death of death. Reports of animated corpses feeding on…
Huffing and puffing to resuscitate a long-moribund genre, James Mangold manages to imbue a 50-year-old Western with the semblance of life. Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma isn’t as startling a resurrection job as his Johnny Cash biopic, but it does send a saddlebag full of Western tropes skittering into…
Back in 1995, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise gave flesh to a Yank’s fantasy of worldly European womanhood: Julie Delpy’s Celine, a sprite who materialized on a passenger train for one sweet Viennese night of courtship and flirtation, as if willed from the fevered dreams above a thousand hostel beds. As…
Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled Iraq war into an enraging, apocalyptic litany of fuck-ups. One may have already heard some or all of the absurd, shameful, appalling details that Ferguson collects — the well-connected American kid…
