Even if one’s not seen Quentin Dupieux’s loopy telekinetic tire movie Rubber [2010] it’s quite clear from the start of Wrong – the wrong “A Film By” credit, followed by a nice if obvious gag on the hackneyed alarm clock shot – that this is going to be another surreal oddity. Dolph (Jack […]
2012
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: Berberian Sound Studio (Dir. Peter Strickland UK 2012 )
This is unashamedly unconventional, but in a fan rather than snooty way. Using (mostly) just diegetic sound from the post-production of a fictional mid-70s Italian horror movie, Peter Strickland has followed his superb debut, Katalin Varga [2009], with a largely non-narrative nightmare hymn both to the electronic soundtrack experiments of that time, and to the […]
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: The Angel’s Share (Dir. Ken Loach UK/France/Belgium/Italy 2012 )
There are pockets of whimsy in the Ken Loach filmography, but following 2009’s Looking for Eric, he seems more fully than ever to be embracing an Ealing-inflected lightheartedness. The Angel’s Share starts off in reasonably familiar territory, as a succession of poor, unemployed Scots have their petty crimes recounted in court, and the community service […]
Skyfall is the Best Bond’s Looked in Years
Thus far Daniel Craig’s James Bond films – Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace – have been a mixed bag. While the former was a successful reinvention of agent 007 the latter threw most of those intriguing concepts away in favor of a humdrum story about water being our most precious resource. However, despite the […]
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: A Highjacking (Kapringen) (Dir. Tobias Lindholm Denmark 2012 )
Director Tobias Lindholm’s first feature film R was a gritty prison drama that upheaved the generic genre conventions that came before. His second feature takes a drastic look at a very topical subject, and one very much ignored in detail in the media–except for the sensationalizing of pirates sailing the open sea. A Highjacking is […]