Junebug has an affection for empty physical space, silence, and the way sound travels through a house at night. The result is a typically indie meet-the-parents family drama infused with eerie, unacknowledged loneliness. Plus: a dully competent Proof.
If the co-directors of the documentary Paradise Lost had made a more forceful movie – one that ripped apart this case they clearly think is so flimsy – they might have actually freed the accused. Instead, they crafted a portrait of a community with its innards exposed. It seems obvious enough that when it’s a matter of freedom, decades in prison, and death, one shouldn’t fuck around, but they do.
I fought Millions for as long as I could. But in the end, it won. It’s a charming little movie that casts magical realism as the mind of a child. Plus: an easy dismissal of Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
Imagine a mystery story in which the detective started to explain the killer’s method and motive, paused 30 seconds in, and said, “It’s pretty convoluted. Let’s skip that part.” That’s how the Oscar-nominated documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room works.
That Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy works at all is surprising. It’s hilariously contrived, wildly improbable, and at times downright goofy in its broad comedy, most of it based in the main character’s unleashed id. The movie’s underlying self-seriousness runs so deep that it threatens to become its own form of silliness. And its pitch is constant extremity, from acute rage to blubbering desperation. Yet the effect is not tonal incongruity, but a messy mix of emotions that’s true to its protagonist.
In Palindromes, writer/director Todd Solondz has a wonderfully oddball conceit: Eight actors of widely disparate ages, races, body types, and dispositions – and even one boy – play 13-year-old Aviva Victor over the course of the movie. It’s obviously meant as a jarring, difficult film, but it’s curiously tame, the function of a concept in search of something to say.
Murderball is the perfect movie to show to people who think they don’t like documentaries, because it transcends the genre; above all else, it’s a very good sports movie – compelling, fun, smart, and accessible.
In Dark Water, the 2002 Japanese horror movie that was re-made in the United States in 2005, an anxious, annoying, newly single mother named Yoshimi rents a very wet apartment and encounters a greenish ghost. I thought: Certainly this would have been a much more entertaining film if Yoshimi battled the pink robots instead.
The easy, conventional reading of Lars von Trier’s Dogville casts it as an anti-American screed. Yet that interpretation exists almost completely outside of the movie itself. In other words, many of von Trier’s critics are full of shit.
The core material of Julia Sweeney’s performance movie God Said, “Ha!” is strong enough to nearly overcome the treatment.
