For whatever reason, most of the best films I saw at the Toronto Film festival this year were also the creepiest. Les Revenants, a French film, tries out the zombie movie as an intellectual exercise. Well, zombies may be putting it a bit strongly, since the “returnees” (as the title puts it, though look for […]
Andy Davis
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All the sex films are in Toronto
Toronto’s economy suffered a blow this week with the first half of the Toronto Film festival. Sales of pay-per-view porn declined dramatically in hotel rooms as visiting press and industry delegates were treated gratis to a never-ending flow of explicit sex on the festival screens. Okay, just kidding, but there was quite a lot of […]
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Sifting through the fake, looking for the real
By interesting chance, two films coming up at the Dryden are dryly humorous but serious attempts to parse fictional films for their documentary content and to question the boundaries of what a documentary film might be. The first, Bright Leaves, is Ross McElwee’s third mainstream release since his entertainingly personal epic Sherman’s March. His films […]
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Playing the replay game
Taking a scene and replaying it from different perspectives is, if not exactly common, not exactly new, either. Films from Rashomon to Pulp Fiction have employed the trick to mine both novelty and depth out of a single scene. But The Trilogy, a new set of films from French director (and mainly actor) Lucas Belvaux, […]
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Also playing…
Co-conspirator ofFrançois Ozon, Marina de Van has emerged with a very personal directorial debut, In My Skin. She plays a young professional with druggy, vampiric looks who, with everything going well with her career and relationship, becomes… overly engrossed in herself, you might say. A tumble in the metal-strewn backyard of a party results in […]
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Desperate love, desperate measures
Three movies playing around town right now tell tales of obsessive love spawning disturbed behavior. A Slipping Down Life, a pleasantly rewarding indie film just now making it into theaters after five years of technical wrangles, has the most natural approach, and seems in danger of being overlooked for its lack of sensationalism. The […]
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Another look at classic movie bombs
How did Ishtar (1987), director Elaine May’s fourth and final feature, come to be the ultimate shorthand for cinematic failure? While it’s far from perfect, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman eventually manage to wrangle some chemistry out of their time together on-screen, and the film is often quite funny. So what happened? The film […]
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Thirty years apart, 30 days of fast food
The must-see film of the moment is playing for one night at the Dryden this Friday. Walkabout (1971)is director and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s finest hour, a perfect jewel of a movie. A boy and his older sister are stranded in the Australian outback when their father, seemingly an emblem of staid society driven mindless by […]
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Also playing…
Bon Voyage brings spectacle to the screen for moviegoers who aren’t so much into gladiators and CGI and the like, and does it with old-fashioned panache. It posits the eve of World War II as a giddy, exciting time to be alive in France, as the leaders of Paris convene in Bordeaux to decide whether […]
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Revenge is a dish best served by a Dane
Something’s rotten in Denmark. Or on a soundstage in Denmark, anyway, which for the purposes of Dogville stands in for a small town in the Rockies during the Depression. Well, the chalk outlines of a town, because aside from those and some furniture, that is all we see of it. Director Lars Von Trier (Dancer […]
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Also playing… The films of Chris Marker
“He wrote me…” This is the mantra of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil(Sunless). A woman reads in voiceover what a friend has written her, as footage he has shot plays out underneath in rapid, random succession. The film is a sort of travelogue, mostly of Japan and Africa, and the words are a travelogue of […]
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Also playing…
The Dryden presents on the next two Tuesdays a series of films by Chris Marker. Marker, among other things, is a film essayist, and two recent, well-regarded films will be shown during the first night’s screening. (Two classics will be shown during the second, and will be reviewed here next week.) One Day in […]
