The first English-language feature from Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu brings together disparate characters by the same matchmaking method of his Amores Perros: by car accident. Benicio Del Toro, a born-again ex-con, runs over the husband and two daughters of Naomi Watts, and the husband's heart is transplanted anonymously into …
Art-house schlock from Danish director Lars von Trier, sort of Ingmar Bergman meets Rob Zombie, or in other words scab-picker gone full-bore mutilator. It tells of a grieving couple who repair to a lonely cabin in the Northwest woods — a spot Biblically, ironically, caustically called Eden — to work …
A situation reminiscent of Jack Clayton's Our Mother's House (1967): a family of sudden orphans buries their Mum on the premises and keeps her death a secret. Writer-director Andrew Birkin, working from a novel by Ian McEwan, takes an hour to get to where Clayton got in a few minutes; …
Jamesian literary tale without the concentration, the ardor, the resonance: an Arab-American academic attempts to secure the co-operation of the family for a biography of a suicided one-book author in Uruguay. A James Ivory film post-Ismail Merchant (d.2005), but still with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to do the screenplay and Anthony …
Wim Wenders’s latest takes us through 12 years in the life of a writer who accidentally ran over a child and the emotional cauterization of feelings the tragedy visits upon all parties involved. Wenders can photograph nothing and make it interesting, which is kind of what he does with screenwriter …
Written and directed by Emanuele Crialese, this is a film that really and truly does its subject — the historical immigrant journey — from beginning to end, bottom to top, forwards and backwards, rustic Sicily to Ellis Island. It does it with taste, with telling detail, and with artistic vision, …
In sharp contradiction of its title (translated Dead Tired), this is a frisky and reckless bit of cinephiliac fun, written and directed by, and starring, Michel Blanc. As himself. The premise sets up like so: Blanc's life and work have started to be disrupted (a middle-of-the-night rousting by the cops, …
Consider-the-possibilities marital comedy written and directed by Yvan Attal, revolving around three car salesmen in contrasting marital states, and achieving a quality of genuine discourse. Tender moment: Attal, who also plays one of the three salesmen, gazing at his wife's neck as Elvis sings of how he can't help falling …
Todd Haynes blows another cloud of mist into the mystique of Bob Dylan. The filmmaker, who once enlisted Barbie dolls to tell the Karen Carpenter story, now borrows a gimmick used by Todd Solondz in Palindromes, employing a rotation of dissimilar actors to play a single role, a multiplication of …
Independent from original thinking. Director Roland Emmerich and his band of four co-screenwriters waited 20 years to crap out a sequel, and this is the best they can come up with? Even the updated CG effects effects aren’t an improvement. If Independence Day was, as my predecessor Duncan Shepherd observed, …
Independent from original thinking. Director Roland Emmerich and his band of four co-screenwriters waited 20 years to crap out a sequel, and this is the best they can come up with? Even the updated CG effects effects aren’t an improvement. If Independence Day was, as my predecessor Duncan Shepherd observed, …
Director (and co-writer here) Arnaud Desplechin has made three films featuring Paul Dédalus. In those films, Paul has a diplomat brother named Ivan. Ismael’s Ghosts opens with a scene from a film-in-progress about Ivan Dédalus made by one Ismaël Vuillard, played with wild-eyed abandon by Mathieu Amalric, the same actor …
A script co-written by François Truffaut (with Claude de Givray), finally realized by Claude Miller (with the help of two more scriptwriters) four years after Truffaut's death. The children's marching song behind the opening credits, containing the phrase "the best way to walk," reminds us that Miller had directed a …