Category: Review

Review

Bong Joon-ho's Latest, 'Mother', Pleases

Already one of the heroes of South Korean cinema’s recent creative renaissance, Bong Joon-ho had an international success well beyond arthouse parameters with 2006’s The Host. That delightfully old-fashioned (albeit with up-to-the-moment CGI effects) sci-fi monster movie with a distinct local flavor managed what so many similar Hollywood exercises fail to do: Deliver thrills and spectacle without stinting on character involvement, social commentary, humor or even poignancy.

topics: actors, asian cinema, directors, genre films, world cinema

Review

Buscemi in Fine, Droll Form in 'St. John of Las Vegas'

Steve Buscemi is one of those actors people are instantly happy to see on screen, even if their recall stretches no farther than “Hey—it’s that guy!” The guy they probably saw on several episodes of 30 Rock or The Sopranos, or playing numerous support roles each for the Coen Brothers, Adam Sandler and Michael Bay. (What a combination!) Like those great studio contract players who reflected the light of glamorous stars during Hollywood’s “golden era,” he’s both a scene-stealer and a team player, seizing his moments and then some but never disrupting the overall fabric of a film.

topics: actors, comedy

Review

Can't stop the musical: PFA revels in classics of the form

As soon as the silent era hit sound circa 1927, musicals became a leading film genre worldwide. How could their appeal possibly die out?

Yet it gradually did—starting in the 1950s (despite marvels from Singin’ in the Rain to Gigi), escalating in the late ’60s (when myriad big-budget musicals thirsting after The Sound of Music’s success flopped). Nails were thumped into the coffin by later duds like Lost Horizon (1973), Xanadu and Can’t Stop the Music (both 1980).

topics: comedy, directors, drama, music, musicals, pacific film archive

Review

Haneke's The White Ribbon has unspoken fascist future waiting in the wings

In Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon a man is injured when his horse trips over a wire mysteriously strung across his gate. A small child is abducted and brutally beaten. Another is nearly blinded. An elderly woman is killed in a work-related accident. Children are tied to their beds, severely disciplined, and molested by their parents. Everyone lives in fear and suspicion. At the film’s beginning an elderly narrator tells us that he is recounting these terrible events that happened in his small farming community to “clarify things that happened in our country" afterward.

topics: directors, world cinema

Review

Suspense, stillness, and beauty in "Three Monkeys"

When Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Best Director prize at Cannes last year for Three Monkeys—which opens on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Friday—it couldn’t have been much of a surprise. He’d been winning awards since his first feature (1997’s Kasaba a.k.a. Small Town), including prior Cannes ones for Distant (2002) and Climates (2006), while Clouds of May (1999) was nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin.

That’s pretty heady achievement for a 50-year-old director who’s only worked in film since 1995 (debuting with the short Koza), and whose five features to date haven’t yet fully distracted him from his other creative pursuit as a photographer. (It’s a craft that’s very much present in the painstaking beauty of his films’ typically stationary shots.)

topics: directors, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema

Review

An odd couple for new times in "Goodbye Solo"

While short-attention-span editing, comic book-derived content and crass commercialism have been dumb-sizing audiences for years, a few U.S. filmmakers are now conspicuously moving in the opposite direction entirely. And some viewers are actually welcoming the change. Their box-office numbers might not underwrite much more than the craft service, driver and personal assistant budgets on the average CGI-dominated Hollywood sequel, but movies by Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy), Thomas McCarthy (The Visitor) and even those mumblecore types have won more than just critical acclaim. They seem to speak to audiences who not only respond to intimate, unflashy character studies of very ordinary people, but seem outright relieved by an aesthetic whose pacing doesn’t risk triggering an epileptic attack.

One of the newest and most notable practitioners of this stripped-down filmic and narrative style is Ramin Bahrani, the Iranian American filmmaker whose features Man Push Cart and Chop Shop were minimalist slices of modern working-class life in a classic neorealist tradition, authentic and almost invisibly crafted. His latest prompted kingmaker Roger Ebert to pronounce Bahrani “the new great American director” a couple weeks ago.

topics: actors, african american cinema, african cinema, directors, diy, hollywood, independent film, world cinema

Review

The suburbs swing to the '60s in "Viva"

When you ponder the great films of the 1960s, what comes to mind? Maybe Bonnie & Clyde, Easy Rider, Blow-Up, 2001? Yes, yes, all very nice.

But when I’m jonesing for something that really exposes the shocking truth about that "turbulent decade," I head straight for anything that’s got "suburb" in the title. Can’t think of any such things? You are not alone, but for shame! anyway. Nothing mixes high camp and dated social relevance quite like the softcore smut of the "Swinging" Sixties, particularly those efforts centering on bored housewives and cheating spouses.

topics: genre films, reviews, sex

Review

Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World"

Given his eternal fascination with extremes of location, lifestyle and filming logistics, it makes sense that Werner Herzog’s latest documentary was shot in Antarctica—and as he wants to make clear right away, it is NOT about penguins. Encounters at the End of the World duly has some stunning shots of landscapes (and seascapes). But in typically perverse Herzog fashion it’s far less about nature than about the people who find themselves living and working—if only for a few months per year—in this place most inhospitable to mankind.

topics: documentary, environmental films, reviews

Review

"Mongol's" Mr. Nice Guy: Genghis Khan

Our current global reality is marked by a whole lotta violence in the name of righteousness, so perhaps it makes sense that Mongol makes a hero out of a man whose name has for centuries been synonymous with indiscriminate barbaric slaughter. Which is not to say Sergei Bodrov’s movie—which might as well be called Genghis Khan: The Early Years and is purportedly first in a projected trilogy—is necessarily a whitewashing of history.

topics: reviews

Review

"Standard Operating Procedure" and the stories we tell

SF360 asked Bay Area writers and fans to comment on the films of SFIFF51. Stephen Elliott reports from the April 29 Persistence of Vision screening of Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure, opening May 9. The screening was preceded by an onstage conversation between B. Ruby Rich and Morris. This story appeared originally in SF360.org on April 30.

He calls it the "Interrotron." The way Errol Morris interviews a subject is to speak into a camera. His image is then projected on a screen and the interviewee responds into the camera. It’s like a teleprompter that allows the game show host or newscaster to speak directly to you while reading her lines. And that’s the feeling of Morris’ films of the last 15 years, particularly The Fog Of War, featuring former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: that the subject is speaking directly to the audience. And that’s the feeling of Standard Operating Procedure. The interviewees, primarily the low level military police on duty at Abu Ghraib prison who participated in and photographed the torture of Iraqi prisoners deep inside the war zone, are talking to you.

topics: directors, documentary, political film, reviews, san francisco international film festival