Reviews Archive for November, 2008
Quo Vadis
As the pool of epic movies yet to be released on DVD diminishes, each release that does appear seems to become all the more significant. Warner Home Video has issued an impressive Two-Disc Special Edition of the 1951 MGM production, Quo Vadis. 1951, remember, was before widescreen or stereo sound was utilized to make such movies…
Read the full article »Not Quite Hollywood The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! Directed by Mark Hartley
Not Quite Hollywood may be my favorite talking-heads-and-clips movie ever. (That’s Entertainment is not really a doc, but just a series of great clips from great musicals… different animal.) It is complete, and informative. But mostly, it’s very, very entertaining. From the very beginnings of the Aussie film business to the sexual exploitation and self-mockery…
Read the full article »Che Directed by Steven Soderbergh
My first reaction to Steven Soderbergh’s Che was absolute shock at the idiocy and arrogance of it all… that is to say, the idiocy and the arrogance of the response from Cannes. This is one reason why I hate seeing a movie “after the fact.” It is a real challenge to all critics – and any one…
Read the full article »What to Catch the Second Half of AFI Fest
AFI Fest, which kicked off last Thursday, is a different sort of fest than Sundance or Cannes or Toronto. Many of the films on the schedule are what I would consider more mainstream-friendly fare (which is not at all to say they aren’t good films). Much of the schedule here is kind of a “best…
Read the full article »Hunger
Hunger focuses on the Irish prison hunger strike led by Bobby Sands in 1981. The depiction of the squalor these predominantly political prisoners live in and the endless beatings they undergo from jailers is vividly and unflinchingly portrayed. Written and directed by the acclaimed installation artist Steve McQueen, it’s an accomplished first film and, at the same…
Read the full article »Hurt Locker
The best Iraq movie so far (closely nipping Nick Broomfield’s Battle For Haditha) and the best new American film at TIFF that I have seen this year is Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker, which really isn’t so much an Iraq War film as it is a war film that happens to be in Iraq. Mark Boal’s screenplay does what so…
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