They toss a ball back and forth and dream of fleeing their small town to visit California, promising they’ll be “friends to the end,” and it’s the kind of intense bond best pals share when they’re tweens, before puberty hits and girls become a distraction.
The Altman-esque ensemble method of developing a story around a particular event (in this situation, the last day of high school) had been done before, although not quite like this. There was a great deal of ’70s nostalgia during the ’90s, but Linklater’s “Slacker” followup is more than just a stylistic homage; the big cast of characters are made to feel so common that audiences are essentially just hanging out with them for one hundred minutes.
star Christopher Plummer won an Oscar for his performance in this moving drama about a widowed father who finds love again after coming out in his 70s.
Charbonier and Powell accomplish a good deal with a little, making the most of their low spending budget and single site and exploring every sq. foot of it for maximum tension. They establish a foreboding temper early, and efficiently tell us just enough about these Little ones and their friendship to make the best way they fight for each other feel not just believable but substantial.
The story of a son confronting the family’s patriarch at his birthday gathering about the horrors in the past, the film chronicles the collapse of that family under the burden in the buried truth being pulled up with the roots. Vintenberg uses the camera’s lack of ability to handle the natural minimal light, and the subsequent breaking up from the grainy image, to perfectly match the disintegration of the family over the course of your working day turning to night.
Gauzy pastel hues, flowery designs and lots of gossamer blond hair — these are some of the images that linger after you emerge from the trance cast by “The Virgin Suicides,” Sofia Coppola’s snapshot of five sisters in parochial suburbia.
The movie is really a peaceful meditation around the loneliness of being gay in a very repressed, rural society that, though not as pornzog high-profile as Brokeback Mountain,
“Admit it isn’t all cool calculation with you – that you’ve got a heart – even if it’s small and feeble and you may’t remember the last time you used it,” Marcia Gay Harden’s femme fatale demands of protagonist Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne). And for all its steely violence, this film includes a heart as well.
Nearly thirty years later, “Odd Days” is really a tricky watch due to onscreen brutality against Black folks and women, and because through today’s cynical eyes we know such footage rarely enacts the alter desired. Even so, Bigelow’s alluring and visually arresting film continues to enrapture because it so perfectly captures the misplaced hope brazzers video of its time. —RD
Emir Kusturica’s characteristic exuberance and frenetic pacing — which normally feels like Fellini on Adderall, accompanied by a raucous Balkan brass band — reached a fever pitch in his tragicomic masterpiece “Underground,” with that raucous Electricity my desi net spilling across the tortured spirit of his beloved Yugoslavia since the country experienced through an extended duration of disintegration.
Tailored from the László Krasznahorkai novel in the same name and maintaining the book’s great dangler sucking skills of brunette mariana pink dance-influenced chronology, Béla Tarr’s seven-hour “Sátántangó” tells a Möbius strip-like story about the collapse of the farming collective in post-communist Hungary, news of which inspires a mystical charismatic vulture of a person named Irimiás — played by composer Mihály Vig — to “return from the lifeless” and prey around the desolation he finds Among the many desperate and easily manipulated townsfolk.
had the confidence or the cocaine or whatever the hell it took to attempt something like this, because the bigger the movie gets, the more it seems like it couldn’t afford for being any smaller.
Looking over its shoulder in a century of cinema for the same time mainly because it boldly steps into the next, the aching coolness of “Ghost Pet” may well have seemed silly if not for Robby Müller’s gloomy russian porn cinematography and RZA’s funky trip-hop score. But Jarmusch’s film and Whitaker’s character are both so beguiling with the strange poetry they find in these unexpected combinations of cultures, tones, and times, a poetry that allows this (very funny) film to maintain an unbending feeling of self even since it trends to the utter brutality of this world.
Mambety doesn’t underscore his points. He lets Colobane’s turn toward mob violence take place subtly. Shots of Linguere staring out to sea combine beauty and malice like few things in cinema considering that Godard’s “Contempt.”