Film

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…

ZOMBIE FILMMAKING There are huge citywide vistas of rambling crowds in World War Z, which may be the first film in which the cast seems to exceed the actual population of the planet.   Most of these people are infected with a zombie virus that turns them into rattlesnakes with overbites and clammy hair. The fantastic…

MANIAC LEAVES YOU FEELING SCALPED Based on William Lustig’s 1980 film of the same name, Maniac, directed by Franck Khalfoun and penned by Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, has dynamic cinematography (Maxime Alexandre), gore effects that are frighteningly realistic (KNB Mike McCarty), and a performance by Nora Arnezeder as Anna which, though idling in the…

AN IRONING MACHINE, OR IRONY MAN In a movie where flying metal meets flying metaphors, Iron Man 3 is like rooting for a good hammer. Billionaire playboy industrialist Tony Stark makes it possible to pilot a fleet of Iron Man outfits by remote control while he munches In-N-Out burgers from miles away. Iron Man has…