Vic + Flo Saw A Bear is something like an expansion on Denis Côté’s last, the strictly observational non-documentary Bestiaire (2012), although that in turn was a distillation of his favoured practice of looking at slightly odd characters shut away from the world. In Curling (2010) and Carcasses (2009), for example, it was by their […]
Uncategorized
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: The Extravagant Claims Of ‘R100’
The title R100 is a joke on the ratings system because director Hitoshi Matsumoto (Big Man Japan, 1997) claims that no-one who has not lived a century will understand this film. Such a pronouncement is in keeping with the striving absurdity of the movie, which is frequently funny, but overall a slightly laboured litany of […]
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: The Complex, Troubled, And Intriguing ‘Closed Curtain’
Jafar Panahi continues to defy the 20-year ban on film-making imposed on him by the Iranian government with a new feature, co-directed and starring his colleague and frequent collaborator Kambozia Partovi, and it is an intriguing magnification of his last illicit achievement, This Is Not A Film (2011). That title was wittily, bitterly disingenuous, whereas […]
Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Noah’ Debuts First Trailer
The day just got a whole lot better because Darren Arnonofsky’s Noah has its first trailer. Everyone knows the story, obviously, but in Aronofsky’s hands this is not going to be the old testament’s Noah, oh no. Watch the trailer now, and prepare for the flood March 28, 2014. The day just got a whole […]
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: Greatness Amongst Carnage In ‘Lone Survivor’
The sound of bones crunching against a tree, as a man’s body tumbles down an unforgiving hill; not once, but twice. This is the sound that haunts you after watching Lone Survivor, superseding the gunfire, explosions, helicopter propellers, and painful screams of four men being ambushed in Afghanistan by Taliban forces. It could easily go […]