A variant of what military leaders call “the fog of war” shrouds much of The Blood of My Brother, Andrew Berends’s unsettling and uncensored documentary about the effects of the American occupation in Iraq. In the film’s first scene, we behold a black-clad middle-aged Iraqi woman and her nineteen-year-old son…
Sweet, crazy and tinged with sadness, The Science of Sleep is a wondrous concoction. The tricksy romantic narrative — in which Gael García Bernal plays a hapless, Chaplinesque madman — may be reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Michel Gondry directed from Charlie Kaufman’s script. The look,…
Self-conscious aesthete, existential structuralist, one of the world’s most eloquent conjoiners of metaphysical mystery and sociopolitical critique, and a still-missed fallen soldier in the shrinking ranks of Euro art film, Krzysztof Kieslowski was only a well-known global figure for about six years before he died — beginning in 1989 with…
One would never confuse the work of writer-director Todd Phillips with that of the late Robert Hamer, whose filmography includes the essential Kind Hearts and Coronets. Hamer’s movies had a gentlemanly quality, no matter the cruelty that skulked beneath their prim exteriors; one always felt the characters in his movies,…
Emilio Lobato and Martha Daniels. The solos that open the season at William Havu Gallery combine the disparate work of two of the area’s best-known and well-regarded artists. On the walls is Emilio Lobato: Desde Siempre (Since Forever), which comprises the artist’s signature abstractions. The title refers to Lobato’s self-exploration…
The Big Animal (Milestone) It’s a simple yet lesser known law of comedy: Camels are always funny. There are the jaws that drool and chew side to side, the front legs that move like a human’s, the humps — but mostly it’s the eyes: There’s something of Buddha in a…
According to the publicity material for All the King¹s Men, bringing Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel of the same name to the screen again has always been “a cherished dream” of executive producer James Carville — suggesting a lurking sense of payback frustration with the insubstantial legacy of the real…
Anyone who wants to start feeling good about war again — and hey, pilgrim, isn’t it about time? — might do well to take in Flyboys. In this elaborate, computer-generated fantasy, the plucky volunteer pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille are once more cast as “knights of the sky,” dashing young…
Fans of Hong Kong cinema have been anticipating Jet Li¹s Fearless all year, if not longer. The star is arguably the best in the business at combining major ass-kicking with actual acting; the director is Ronny Yu, known here for over-the-top horror sequels but more familiar to genre fans as…
Despite its title, Confetti, a chaotic mockumentary in the finest tradition of English vulgarity, has nothing whatever to say about marriage. It’s a loud belch in the face of a billion-dollar wedding industry that has sprung up to service the longings of the post-feminist young for ceremonial opulence. Broad as…
Set in 1942 and ’43 and shot in 1969, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows follows a small group of French Resistance fighters in their desperate struggle to survive the Nazis. The movie, too, has been in hiding, at least in the United States, where, amazingly, it went unreleased for 37…
The transgressive German chase movie Run Lola Run happily tramples all our usual ideas about narrative structure, chronology and character, and for that alone, it’s one of the most fascinating artifacts of the late 1990s. Critic Roger Ebert called it “an exercise in kinetic energy, a film of nonstop motion…
Eugene Yelchin. Over the past several years, Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind has often presented exhibits highlighting the work of Jewish artists who hail from the former Soviet Union. And for these exhibits, Zalkind has turned to Mina Litinsky, director of the Sloane Gallery in LoDo, who’s an acknowledged expert…
The Proposition (First Look) There’s an old saying about Ginger Rogers, who did everything Fred Astaire did — but backwards and in heels. This Australian western seems to be saying something similar about gritty American westerns: You think that’s hard? Try living in the Outback. The Proposition mucks about in…
Directed by Brian De Palma from the novel by neo-noirist James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia is a true-crime policier unfolding in late-’40s Los Angeles somewhere between the neighborhoods of Chinatown and Mulholland Drive. The premise involves one of L.A.’s most notorious unsolved homicides. In early 1947, the naked corpse of…
The Rock — formerly known as “Flex Kavana” and, a bit later, as “Rocky Maivia” — was a practicing actor long before he turned to movies and started taking down $12 million paychecks. The happily deluded throngs who used to watch him lay signature moves like the People’s Elbow or…
Viva Pedro: A Festival of the Best of Pedro Almodovar raises some questions — namely, which Almodovar? The Pedro gloriously festivaled and happily familiar now to middle-class film-goers is an aging, camp-centric teddy bear, a man who has made transgender game-playing and comic vamping safe for the arthouses and has…
Even curriculum-clutchers might rather leave a child behind than let her learn from Half Nelson’s Mr. Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), a Brooklyn junior-high teacher whose off-the-cuff history lessons are based — brace yourself, Bushies — on dialectical theory. History is change, and change, the white teacher tells the kids, most…
Those twenty-somethings, poor dears, can never catch a break in the movies. First this maligned generation is told, in countless gritty indies and perky studio comedies, that they’re rowing through life without oars. Now director Tony Goldwyn’s admirably understated handling of dispiritingly slender material suggests that if you’re pushing thirty,…
An act, more than anything, of due homage and genuflection to David Mamet the ’70s-’80s theatrical provocateur (as opposed to Mamet the ’90s-’00s screenplay doodler), the film version of his 1983 one-act play Edmond is a pleasant actor’s spectacle. You never have to get involved; like so much of Mamet’s…
Granted, this may seem like a jarringly odd comparison, but like the recent dud Phat Girlz, Heading South deals with the hot-button issue of middle-aged women discovering their sexuality anew thanks to the efforts of muscular black men with exotic accents whose standards of female beauty are more flexible than…
Released last year, the Oscar-nominated Sophie Scholl: The Final Days recalls the dark days of Nazi Germany in a fresh and disturbing new way — through the ordeal of an intelligent, idealistic university student (Julia Jentsch) who challenges the regime by distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in a classroom building. In February…
