Because of its extremely low budget, narrow focus, and to be honest, its rather rough visual quality, the new independent motion picture Open Water has already drawn comparisons to the most successful indy cheapie of them all, the overhyped, overrated, astonishingly profitable Blair Witch Project. Some wags, in fact, refer to the movie as The […]
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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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An odyssey of murder
The major publicity approach to the new Michael Mann film revolves around the fact that in Collateral Tom Cruise, his trim beard and hair dyed gray, undertakes a role very different from most of his previous star turns. In a departure from such previous work as the engaging title character of Jerry Maguire, the […]
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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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Building and breaking the vision of utopia
In his latest movie, The Village, M. Night Shyamalan again displays his own distinctive combination of suspense and horror, which differs in both kind and degree from the work of his fellow toilers in the dark mines of dread. His best known work, successful or not, often blends the humdrum and the ordinary with genuine […]
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The director behind Dude, Where’s My Car? updates the brand with two smart ethnic guys in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and here’s the twist: Oh wait, that was the twist. Dude, I am so stoned right now. Just kidding, but one of the small revelations of this purposefully dumb road flick is […]
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Time of the Wolf, the new film from French director Michael Haneke, begins with the same simple, unassuming style of credits that begin his other films. It’s a signal that you’re back in Haneke’s lab. He has a habit of playing with his viewers, forcing them to construct meaningful associations between random, prosaic moments in […]
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The necessary thriller for a culture of paranoia
Both Richard Condon’s ingenious novel, The Manchurian Candidate, and the subsequent film adaptation confronted some controversial subjects in the America of the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly in the destructive dialectic of the Cold War. Both works deal with Communism, McCarthyism, and a peculiarly American version of the Oedipus complex, the concept that Phillip […]
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The spirit in the machine
The credits of I, Robot delicately state that the movie was “suggested” by the work of Isaac Asimov, one of the most famous and successful writers of science fiction back in the Golden Age of the 1950s. The picture, however, differs drastically from the original collection of short stories, especially in transforming some of Asimov’s […]
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Anne Reid’s gutsy, masterful performance in the title role of The Mother throws down the gauntlet in this year’s Oscar race. She plays a newly widowed woman who gets entangled with a married man… almost half her age… who also happens to be her daughter’s boyfriend. May (Reid) is understandably shaken by her husband’s […]
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Big Lebowski fans, sit up and take notice: The Dryden is screening a little-known template for that film this Thursday, one week before they put the Dude up there himself. While Cutter’s Way (1981) stands on its own just fine, thank you, it’s similarly impossible not to view the earlier film through the lens of […]
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A new Arthuriad for our time
Centuries of Arthuriads suggest that every age creates its own version of the great saga, probably the most important single myth for literature in Western Europe, particularly in Great Britain. The many stories of knightly valor and honor, the fellowship of the Round Table, the grand quest for the Holy Grail have inspired countless works, […]
