Claire Denis’s gray portrait of black Parisians, a grizzled train engineer and his full-grown daughter at the center of it. There’s a good deal of riding around to cool melodica-ruled music, and an abundance of lifelike little details, but it never quite comes into focus. With Alex Descas, Mati Diop, …
Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) uses Max Ophüls’s dazzling La Ronde as a blueprint for this cluttered globe-hopping melodrama featuring an all-star international cast in various stages of grief and infidelity. The set-up is exquisite: the use of architecture and highly reflective surfaces function as serviceable tributes …
A night and a day with a budding Lolita. Delphine Zentout, notwithstanding her majestic chest, is a credible fourteen-year-old -- no Norma Shearer playing Juliet. But what then? Ragged and draggy realism, laden with French worldliness: "Dip your wick three times in the same girl and forget it." Directed by …
Moody and delicate — and imposing, if you surrender to it. Eric Mendelsohn’s second feature (Judy Berlin came out in 1999) considers a summer day in suburban Long Island. Kasper Tuxen’s light-entranced imagery wraps sensual sites around people whose feelings often fail to find words: an alienated husband (Elias Koteas), …
No one'll ever write a book titled The McG Touch, particularly one based on the time he killed directing this movie. Here’s another Luc Besson production that appears to have been sitting on a shelf in the Cannon Film vault since 1977. Who better than McG (Charlie’s Angels, Terminator Salvation) …
In a fit of calculated desperation, a young woman (Marziyeh Rezaei) fires off several electronic cries-for-help to celebrated Iranian actress Behnaz Jafari (playing herself). When her pleas go unanswered, Rezaei construes the rejection as an excuse to document her hanging — in chilling long-take — and implicate Jafari in the …
Rob Zombie's sequel to everyone's favorite family picture, The Devil's Rejects.
The premise, pretty much deducible from the title, features three unmarried male apartment-mates in Paris who have to baby-sit an illegitimate infant (one of theirs) for six months. This same general situation came out funnier, sweeter, touchinger, everythinger, when it was done with John Wayne in Three Godfathers. The situation …