Park City, Utah — We all know about the cathartic power of blues music, but until the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, who knew that it could serve as a cure-all for everything from nymphomania to childhood sexual abuse? In Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, whose out-of-competition…
One morning, Gary Walkow was suddenly transformed into a successful Hollywood filmmaker. Gone were the hat-in-hand searches for financing, the deferred salaries, the long shooting days with undermanned crews, and the months upon years spent touring the festival circuit while seeking a distribution deal. For a moment, he was taking…
New-school genre junk food: Take a Tarantino wanna-be with Sundance credentials, add a large, famous-enough cast and a show-biz backdrop, season the violence with references to Sergio Leone and Takeshi Kitano, serve cool, and garnish with a cynicism beyond irony. Smokin’ Aces is writer-director Joe Carnahan’s third and most elaborate…
Maurice Russell, a septuagenarian actor facing the end of his career and life, gazes raptly at the present that fate has given him: the company of a sullen but strangely desirable teenage girl. At first, his appraising looks give her the creeps, but something about his courtliness piques her curiosity…
Park City, Utah — On the first Saturday of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I rolled out of bed and hustled up Main Street for the 8:30 a.m. screening of Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings caring for an irascible elderly parent…
Park City, Utah — Ten days of terse texting among professional narcissists working on little or no sleep in one of the last cold spots left on Al Gore’s inconvenient Earth: Welcome to Sundance ’07, where the wounding, home-front melodrama Grace Is Gone sells and it hardly pays to be…
Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth is something alchemical. To an astonishing degree, the 42-year-old Mexican filmmaker best known for his contribution to the Blade and Hellboy franchises has transformed the horror of mid-20th-century European history into a boldly fanciful example of what surrealists would call le…
In the new Clint Eastwood movie, ordinary young men — husbands and fathers, artisans and aristocrats — are drafted into a war whose motives many of them do not fully understand. There, on an island called Iwo Jima, they fight against an enemy who has been demonized by wartime propaganda…
At face value, Alpha Dog — based on a real-life story that’s still waiting for its ending — plays like an amped-up, drugged-out episode of Dragnet: In 2000, a gang of SoCal kids kidnapped and murdered 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz, a soft-spoken boy from the San Fernando Valley who dreamed of…
Like his Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou’s third global-market gigaproduction makes little sense in narrative terms even after two screenings, but the sets, costumes, and cinematography are so intoxicating that it doesn’t much matter. Zhang’s interest in the wuxia (martial arts) film may well extend no further…
It’s official: Hollywood has run out of original ideas. If you thought 2006 was bad, just wait. In 2007, the studios will give up on birthing blockbusters and instead concentrate on cloning them, with sequel after sequel after sequel. Familiar titles will be followed by so many numbers that filmgoers…
On an early December afternoon at the offices of Malpaso Productions, Clint Eastwood’s four Academy Awards have been placed into thick velvet carrying bags, while that famous poncho — the one Eastwood donned for the entirety of Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy — is being carefully loaded into a large shipping…
James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments is a one-man production of startling audacity and aesthetic provocation. It isn’t just that Longley (Gaza Strip) worked unembedded in Iraq for two years after the start of the war, gaining access to the stories of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in wartime and risking his…
A car speeds down a forest road, only to be surrounded in an instant by armed crazies who materialize from the nearby woods. In the visual grammar of big-budget action films, the sequence that ensues should be a scattergun barrage of images: Wheels! Guns! Blood! Shriek! Fireball! Crash! Add a…
Made when he was a stripling of 24, Argentine filmmaker Daniel Burman’s first feature, A Chrysanthemum Burst in Cincoesquinas, was a violent story of love and revenge. He must have gotten that out of his system: Though Burman’s subsequent movies also traffic in what he calls “the great transitions of…
Dashiell Hammett goes to high school — the perfect studio pitch. Yet after wowing ’em at the film fests, Rian Johnson’s knockout debut as writer and director, Brick, languished in theaters and on DVD. It took a bunk, as Hammett mighta said, and wound up wearing a wooden kimono. Johnson,…
Notes on a Scandal, brilliantly adapted by Patrick Marber from the darkly comic Zoë Heller novel, is a grim piece of work — Fatal Attraction for the art-house crowd, shorn of its predecessor’s fearful misogyny. Set in a dreary London where a gray funk of fog and cigarette smoke hangs…
A multimillion-euro adaptation of a best-selling German novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer relates the life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), born in 18th-century Paris with a uniquely puissant sense of smell. He begins life as an orphan, sold into servitude to a brutal tanner, but in Toucan Sam…
Little Children, a second excursion into middle-class unease by Todd Field after his intelligent but overrated In the Bedroom, opens with a slow pan around a living room whose shelves are crowded with cheap china figurines of . . . little children. Twisted into insidious grins, their blood-red lips ooze…
Every New Year’s Eve, I watch my favorite movie. I used to think that everyone had a favorite film until a few years ago, when I hosted a party to which I asked each guest to bring a clip from their most-loved movie. One by one the invitees phoned to…
On a recent Friday morning, 44-year-old movie director Eric Schaeffer woke up at his usual hour of 10:30 in his one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment that he calls “Studio Schaeffer,” got dressed in jeans and a black Nike sweatshirt, and checked to see if any dating prospects had e-mailed him…
It is said that a great actor or actress can “bring down the house,” but before I saw (and heard) the 25-year-old American Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson in the film version of the 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls, I can’t recall the last time I truly feared for the architectural stability…
