”Peepli Live” has been the toast and tea of town for the better part of this past year. A Sundance selection and Berlinale screening, it has been picking up favor and five star reviews across the Prime Meridian, becoming the focus of India’s annual interest in evaluating its culture through the Western eye. Unlike the [...]
Brilliant, vivid colors flood the opening moments of Ya’Ke Smith’s latest short film, “Katrina’s Son.” A bright yellow sun bathes a young boy in a beautiful warmth — a superficial warmth obscured by the coldness of death, abandonment. Ed, a young New Orleans resident quietly mourns the death of his grandmother and only guardian in [...]
July 19, 2010 | Published in
Drama,
Film Reviews,
Short |
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What makes a cliché a cliché? Certainly the repeated use of ideas, concepts or expressions until the original intent or effect is rendered impotent is how clichés are forged. But why are certain storytelling elements used over and over again? It is a matter of intellectual versus emotional storytelling. The cliché is a natural outgrowth [...]
June 26, 2010 | Published in
Drama,
Film Reviews |
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John Favreau doing Michael Bay doing Robert Altman doing Dostoyevsky doing Shakespeare. “Iron Man 2″ is as elegant as it sounds. After battling a pre-Oscar, double-crossing Jeff Bridges in the first film, Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark finds himself pitted against Ivan Vanko, the metal-mouthed Muscovite brainiac version of Mickey Rourke, who is intent on [...]
Tentatively perpetuating his volatile relationship with Universal Pictures after disagreements over a possible fourth installment in the Matt Damon-as-super-spy “Bourne” franchise, director Paul Greengrass, with the studio’s blessing, has decided take his ball and go home — er, I mean to Iraq. After scoring massive hits with the second and third “Bourne” installments, “The Bourne [...]
Martin Scorsese, often cited as our greatest living director, is having something of a late-career crisis. He stormed onto the New Hollywood scene in the late 60s equipped with a singular vision, an intimate knowledge of crippling guilt and human nuance and the god-given talent to turn it all into truth-bearing films on par with [...]
With “Crazy Heart,” first-time writer/director, Scott Cooper, aims to capture an authentic slice of Americana and the romance of the unwieldy west. If he succeeds, it’s no thanks to his direction or adaptation of Thomas Cobb’s novel. The only reason this rough-around-the-edges work of business-as-usual corporate cinema is getting any attention at all is because [...]
Rich, middle-aged, white women sitting around a posh Santa Barbara pad drinking expensive wine and talking about their vaginas. If that doesn’t sound appealing then “It’s Complicated” probably isn’t the movie for you. Nancy Meyers (“What Women Want,” “The Holiday”) directs Meryl Streep as Jane, a lonely, aging, divorced bakery owner who habitually runs into [...]
January 9, 2010 | Published in
Comedy,
Drama,
Film Reviews |
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Peter Jackson’s first feature since 2005′s remake of “King Kong” is, contrary to first impressions, not so much a departure from that picture. The former gross-out horror auteur-turned Oscar-winning director of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy has always had a special knack for visual touches. From schlocky blood and guts to giant talking trees [...]
January 7, 2010 | Published in
Drama,
Fantasy,
Film Reviews |
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“How much does your life weigh?” George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a hit man. He doesn’t kill people, well, at least not directly. He’s a corporate hatchet man who fires people for a living — people with bosses too cowardly to do it themselves. The job is demanding, brutal and cold — just the way [...]
January 6, 2010 | Published in
Comedy,
Drama,
Film Reviews |
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