Pablo Larraín, the writer/director of “No,” shyly introduced his work to the audience at last October’s New York Film Festival by mumbling a few thanks into the microphone and quickly taking a seat. Having seen the filmmaker’s prior two efforts, “Tony Manero” and “Post Mortem,” which make up a spiritual trilogy with “No,” I was […]
And the nominees are… “Kings Point” (Sari Gilman, USA) – It’s been a strong year for movies about what happens to us when we grow old, between “Amour,” the live-action short “Henry,” and this documentary short in which director Sari Gilman follows five residents of the eponymous Florida retirement community where her grandmother lived. It’s
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And the nominees are… “Adam and Dog” (Minkyu Lee, USA) – You’d never guess that this, the most aesthetically beautiful of this year’s nominees, was animated entirely in Photoshop, as the images have the appearance of a stunning blend of oil paints and watercolors. The world created in “Adam and Dog”—a painterly, ‘Scope version of
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And the nominees are… “Death of a Shadow” (Tom Van Avermaet, Belgium) — The 20-minute length doesn’t allow for much explanation of the mechanics behind the intriguing science-fiction-like concept, which involves the collection of the shadows of the dying, so we basically just accept it and focus on the characters’ emotions. These ring true through
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West Hollywood, 1979. One night in a gay bar, Paul (Garret Dillahunt), who has barely come to terms with his homosexuality after the collapse of his heterosexual marriage, locks eyes with drag performer Rudy (Alan Cumming). They have a sexual encounter in the parking lot and Paul gives Rudy his phone number. The next morning,
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When designing high school history textbooks, publishers often incorporate small, colorful boxes filled with “Did you know?”-style trivia about the people and places relevant to the material at hand, so that the otherwise monotonous, dense reading doesn’t become overly tedious for the student. The new FDR film “Hyde Park on the Hudson” feels like the
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Perhaps the biggest problem with Sacha Gervasi’s “Hitchcock” is its title, which suggests that the film is something more ambitious and substantive than it actually is. The singular surname suggests a definitive biopic–in the tradition of “Nixon,” “Patton,” “Chaplin,” and so on–full of insights about the life and career of the man who many consider
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The second most memorable image in Al Gore’s popular global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”–bested only by the former Vice President operating a mechanical lift in order to stand at the top of a big-screen line-graph demonstrating the exponential growth of CO2 in the atmosphere–was the slide in his presentation that showed the dramatic receding
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While Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors” leaves viewers with dozens of questions due to its deliberate lack of a conventional narrative structure and any exposition whatsoever, the ideas that Carax explores in the film become rather clear after one’s initial befuddlement over the story details subsides. Of course, the film is so unlike anything audiences have
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The task of adapting Leo Tolstoy’s 864 page, multi-volume novel “Anna Karenina” for the silver screen undoubtedly possesses a high level of difficulty, not just due to the obvious challenge of condensing such a detailed work into a two-hour production, but because one must be very creative in finding a new angle to tell such
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