Film

WHO’S HUSTLING WHOM? In American Hustle’s would-be signature moment, a con man shows a G-man a Rembrandt in a gallery. He explains that it’s really a fake. Who is the better artist, he asks, the original artist or the person who took the time and skill to fake it? Well, I would say the artist….

ROYAL SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD II COMES TO WESTWOOD Brits had already heard about Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Richard II, directed by Gregory Doran and starring former Doctor Who star David Tennant, who is joined in the Company by Oliver Ford Davies as the Duke of York, Michael Pennington as John of Gaunt and Nigel Lindsay…

SLAVES TO HISTORY Among movies about race in America, how many great films have been made about slavery? We’ve seen pizza places going up in smoke for our sins (Do the Right Thing),  gentle drivers (Driving Miss Daisy), and sisterhoods of maids (The Help). Most of these films focus on the sixties or modern day occurrences….

DEATH OF AN ERA, BIRTH OF A GENRE Rob Kuhns’ Birth of the Living Dead is in part a making-of documentary, and a good one, about the revolutionary 1968 zombie picture Night of the Living Dead.   It’s also a sharp essay celebrating the original George Romero film in historical political context.   It only plays through…

FOUND AND LOST AGAIN Formula movies can make you feel that you’ve already seen them.   But György Pálfi’s latest film, which closed the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, is a love story so familiar that you have, in fact, sat through much of it before.   Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen is a feature-length collage of clips…

SPACE CADET Alfonso Cuaron’s space station disaster saga Gravity is an intellectually soft video game’”a SuperMario of space debris, and a disappointment as a space survival story. A great deal of praise is being heaped on the 3-D outer space experience, labeled as immersive and hypnotic. Comparisons are being drawn to the upside-down, gravity-free experience…

VANISHING CULTURES Kalyanee Mam’s refreshingly quiet and cinematic documentary A River Changes Course follows families in rural Cambodia as they struggle with the effects of global progress on their simple way of life. A fisherman is forced to send his son off to work as a laborer because overfishing has decimated the rivers. A rice…

WHAT A RUSH One day soon, or so we’re told, we will no longer drive. At the edge of the Age of the Driverless Car, taking a spin behind the wheel will become a thing of an increasingly distant past. Trendsetters assure us that this is the next great advance in safety and transportation.   Soon…

GET AS FAR AWAY AS POSSIBLE The car porn chiller Getaway is a movie of wonder.   I wondered about the way the film was actually made – the shooting sequence, the extravagant car flips and pile-ups, the monotone acting.   Did Ethan Hawke actually shoot all of the gear shifting shots?   Or was that Ethan Hawke’s…

THEIR WORLD AND WELCOME TO IT In college more so than high school, I dressed like that: Black trench coat (but mine was brown).   Black slacks.   Doc Martens.   I never owned that Sisters of Mercy T-shirt, but I did own the album with that cover.   That was Gary King’s wardrobe on the last day of…

WHEN BANAL IS SAID AND DONE Claude Miller’s final film Thérèse, based on François Mauriac’s novel Thérèse Desqueyroux, is a masterfully directed, superbly acted, richly photographed and beautifully designed costume drama that thoughtfully illustrates profound aspects of the human condition, and feels as dull and familiar as so many other French or British period pieces…

YET TO COME TO TERM I’m sure Short Term 12, written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, was an earnest effort made with care and love and all the best intentions. I’m sure Mr. Cretton was touched by the subject matter – at-risk teens in a group home and the 20-somethings who supervise them –…

THE ACT OF REINVENTING A MASSACRE If there were a subtitle to Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, it could be “A Re-enactment by Fun-Loving War Criminals.” In this unsettling documentary, a cadre of aging Indonesian gangsters relives their part in a pogrom against communists in the 1960s. In the political chaos of that time,…

PART OF THE AVALANCHE OF INNOCUOUS FILMS Over the past few years a new cinematic sub-genre has emerged – the innocuous independent film. These are low-budget (by Hollywood standards), professionally made movies which, though not exactly objectionable, have very little entertainment or artistic value. David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche, based on the film Either Way…

OLD SCHOOL AND SCARY AS HELL In The Conjuring, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga take the roles of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, a Nick and Nora of supernatural troubleshooting.   The real-life Warrens are best known in some circles as investigators at Amityville, but The Conjuring comes from a lesser known incident earlier in…