Reviews Archive for August, 2010
Wilmington on DVD: Red Riding Trilogy, Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Errol Flynn Adventures … and more

CO-PICKS OF THE WEEK: NEW The Red Riding Trilogy (Four Stars) U.K.; Julian Jarrold/James Marsh/Anand Tucker, 2009 (IFC Films) Easily one of the most ambitious and best films of 2009 is writer Tony Grisoni‘s three part adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding novels. This is noir times three, with the three films spanning a decade…
Read the full article » 1 Comment »DVD Wrap: 9th Company, OSS 117: Lost in Rio, Drive in Cult Classics, Squeal, Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire … and more

9th Company: Blu-ray It took several years before American filmmakers could get a sufficiently tight grip on the enormity of the Vietnam War to produce historically accurate and psychologically coherent portraits of our soldiers as they fought in it. Several anti-war documentaries had been released in the wake of the gradual pullout of U.S. forces,…
Read the full article » 4 Comments »Voynaristic Review: The Last Exorcism

Up until about the last eight or so minutes, I was really into The Last Exorcism. Then it all fell apart at the end, but in a way that was actually kind of interesting to dissect. Director Daniel Stamm, who previously made suicide mockumentary A Necessary Death, uses a similar style here, in an interesting…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Me and Orson Welles, Ajami, Mona Lisa, Elvis 75th Birthday Collection, and more …

CO-PICKS OF THE WEEK: NEW Me and Orson Welles (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.; Richard Linklater, 2009 (Warner/Target) In Me and Orson Welles, Richard Linklater, a director whose films I usually like, takes on a highly ambitious subject that really, really appeals to me — a portrayal of the astonishing youthful theatrical triumphs of…
Read the full article »The DVD Wrap: City Island, The Back-Up Plan, $5 a Day, Three Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg, The Square, Abandoned and more …

City Island: Blu-ray If Leo Tolstoy had written Anna Karenina in the 1970s, instead of the 1870s, and as a screenplay, instead of a novel, it might have begun thusly, “Happy families are all alike; every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way.” Or to put it another way, “Happy families belong in TV…
Read the full article » 1 Comment »Wilmington on Movies: Nanny McPhee Returns, Mao’s Last Dancer, Eat Pray Love and Lottery Ticket

Nanny McPhee Returns (Three Stars) U.S.; Susanna White, 2010 I love Emma Thompson, even snaggle-toothed and warty. And this Thompson-written, Thompson-starring way-beyond-Mary-Poppins WW2-era film of the Matilda books of Christianna Brand — who also wrote that wonderful WW2-set thriller Green for Danger (which became one of Alistair Sim‘s finest hours) — is a little loud,…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: The City of Your Final Destination, Black Orpheus, Hamlet, The Last Song, and more …

PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW The City of Your Final Destination (Three and a Half Stars) U.K.-U.S.; James Ivory, 2009 (Screen Media) In The City of Your Final Destination — maybe the last of the lovably old-fashioned, classically constructed, deeply literate and beautifully wrought Merchant Ivory films, in the string that began back in 1963…
Read the full article » 3 Comments »Wilmington on DVDs: The Magnificent Seven, Date Night, Little Women, Chicago and more …

PICK OF THE WEEK: Blu-Ray The Magnificent Seven (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.; John Sturges, 1960 (MGM) Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1954 battle epic, Seven Samurai was originally distributed in the U.S. under the title The Magnificent Seven. So that’s the title MGM used when John Sturges made the seemingly inevitable Western remake — in…
Read the full article » 1 Comment »Wilmington on DVDs: Sweetgrass, A Prophet, Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music, The Ghost Writer … and more

CO-PICKS OF THE WEEK: NEW Sweetgrass (Four Stars) U.S.; Lucien Castaing-Taylor/Ilisa Barbash, 2010 (Cinema Guild) In Sweetgrass, named for the lushly beautiful Montana country in which it takes place, we see the last summer pasturing of the vast sheep herd that once belonged to the Allested ranch in Big Timber: thousands of sheep blanketing the…
Read the full article »A Prophet: Blu-ray

With all due respect for the lives of the guards and inmates slaughtered by New York State Police at the Attica Correctional Facility in 1971, it’s reasonable to assume that American prisons are more hospitable places to spend a few years of incarceration than those in, say, Turkey, Thailand, China, Brazil, South Africa and Northern…
Read the full article » 1 Comment »The Trouble with Defining the Chick Flick as “Stupid”

Are most Hollywood movies made for women “stupid,” or do Hollywood studios in general tend to make movies for both men and women that aren’t aiming for a high intellectual watermark? I was perusing Entertainment Weekly, reading about the upcoming film Eat, Pray, Love when I came across a sub-story about how movies made for…
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