Spike Lee remakes Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy with good results, but aside from adding a bit of his own style and suspense, there’s nothing new for fans of the original.
Entertainment
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: The Frigid And Soulless ‘Exhibition’
A title at the end reveals that Joanna Hogg’s third feature, Exhibition, is dedicated to the recently-late architect James Melvin, which should come as no surprise since the film is as much a portrait of the sleek, modernist Kensington townhouse in which it is almost exclusively set, as of the mildly dysfunctional marriage that resides […]
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: ‘When Evening Falls On Bucharest Or Metabolism’
Chistian Porumboiu ups the formal rigour of his last, Police, Adjective (2009), with When Evening Falls On Bucharest Or Metabolism; a film composed of 17 shots, most capturing conversations for a full reel’s 11 minutes, and filmed with an almost entirely static camera. His subjects are film director Paul and his actor and new bedmate […]
Asghar Farhadi’s Clever And Nothing More ‘The Past’
Like Asghar Farhadi’s previous film, A Separation (2011), Le passé (The Past) is a superb feat of narrative construction and mise en scène, keeping three to four characters at the centre of attention, and balancing their motives and desires with careful equanimity. The problem is that there’s little more to recommend the film than this […]
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: The Collaborative Vision In ‘A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness’
One wouldn’t necessarily guess it, but A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, a collaborative effort by two of the leading lights of international experimental film, Ben Rivers (UK) and Ben Russell (US), is an enquiry as to where utopia(s) may exist (as noted in interviews and screening introductions). Possible locations, it is suggested, are […]