If INSIDE were a short film, anything up to the Academy™ definition of same, which is to say, 40 minutes or less including the credits, it would be an incisive deconstruction of art as commerce rather than aesthetics driven by a powerful performance by Willem Dafoe. Instead, it runs for 1 hour and 45 minutes,… Read More »
BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN
BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONEY PORN is neither for the intellectually timid nor the prudish. Radu Jude’s romp through cultural hypocrisy and the human penchant for being not just cruel, but also idiots, is designed to confront and confound with savage humor and brutal satire. Lest we have any illusions about the direct approach Jude… Read More »
THE TRUTH (La Vérité)
In Hirokazu Koreeda’s last film, the Oscar®-nominated SHOPLIFTERS, he incisively examined the ethics of capitalism, and its effects on one poverty-stricken, yet devoted, ragtag family ingeniously doing battle with a system designed to keep them down economically. In THE TRUTH, he moves the action from Tokyo to Paris to examine the ethics of veracity on… Read More »
THERAPY FOR A VAMPIRE ( Der Vampir auf der Couch)
THERAPY FOR A VAMPIRE is a droll and loving homage to those classic Universal horror films from the 1930s. This is not pastiche, though. The gothic castle awash in spectral moonlight vies with a dash of Hitchcock’s VERTIGO, and a feminist attitude that is the perfect foil for the king of Penis Envy himself, Sigmund… Read More »
Illuminating DARK STAR: H.R. GIGER’S WORLD
DARK STAR: H.R. GIGER’s WORLD provides much of the information we would expect from an documentary appreciation in cinematic form of an artist’s work. We are given a glimpse into his private life. We are given tantalizing clues into the childhood events from whence sprang the psyche that expresses itself with such strange and compelling images; who… Read More »
OCEANS
Disneynature’s OCEANS, the follow-up to its earlier EARTH, does a very clever thing by way of getting across its environmentalist message. Instead of hitting the audience over the head with disturbing, heartbreaking images of animals being exterminated in all manner of unpleasant ways by actions of an indifferent humankind, it presents all the equally emotional… Read More »
VITUS
The secret life of children is fertile territory. The unsullied logic of those for whom preconceived notions and ossified received wisdom are phenomenon yet to come make for a piquant commentary on both. The innocence, the unrestrained emotion, and the intellect unfettered by the conventions of society are a potent combination in VITUS, a delightful… Read More »