Susanne Bier's latest Dogme-fed melodrama, After The Wedding, repleat with enough Sirkian discomforts and Trieresque disembodiments to shake a Freudian stick at, trods along in the most precarious manner, worrying one into thinking even the tiniest of missteps could result in utter system failure on the part of the film. Luckily for Bier - and for we the viewers - that potentially catastrophic misstep never quite happens. Instead, Bier hands us her most surefooted film to date.

The story of a Danish man, Joseph - played with a wholly unexpected deepness by Mads Mikkelsen - who has left his native soil behind and taken root in India, helping impoversihed children. One day he gets news that he must return to Copenhagen in order to receive grant money to keep the orphanage open. As Joseph reluctantly returns to his hometown - a place he has not seen in twenty years - the melodramatic layers of Bier's film begin to peel away and we see the coincidences (or are they?) of his return home.

Obviously bred of Dogme - and the aesthetic qualities which go with such a birth - Bier has moved on further than the Dogme credo would manifestly allow, and has allowed herself the freedom of breathing the quite less claustrophobic air of all of cinematic history - most notably the histories of Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray and Frank Borzage. Her next obstacle seems to be Hollywood. Her first US production is in the can and the Hollywood remakes of her first two films are in the works. Will she become stunted by the Hollywood system - as so many foreign directors are (think Cuarón, Iñárritu, Tykwer, Verhoeven, Petersen and so on) - just at the very point she is becoming a mature and possibly great filmmaker? Let's cross our fingers for now, and just enjoy the fabrications of her latest film. [04/03/07]

So here is the scenario, if you will. André is a down-on-his-luck (and big time) two bit Moroccan-born, Parisian-bred street hustler who, about to be rubbed out by about a dozen different thugs, decides to end it all by leaping into the Seine. Enter Angela, a six foot tall blonde bombshell with legs all the way up to Heaven and with a penchant for all-out sluttery. She too is leaping into the Seine in order to end it all and with that, André forgets about his own plight and dives in to rescue the apparently drowning leggy damsel-in-distress. In return for this selfless act of heroism, Angela vows to become, more-or-less, André's slave - gleefully doling out any demand he can come up with. Now I do not think there are many men who would say no to this scenario and Luc Besson never once tries in any way to disguise the male fantasy which this film so certainly is. Instead letting it hang out there for all to see - and for some to salivate over.

Certainly though, the idea of male-schlubb-gets-hot-chick is nothing new to even the most moderate viewer of such tv fare as "The King of Queens" or any of its many doppelgangers, nor is it anything different from the slew of Judd Apatow (and his many doppelgangers) films. I am tempted to place my own marriage in here as well, if only I could own up to my own schlubbiness. Of course with most of these shows and movies, we should suspend disbelief and just laugh-for-laughs-sake. In Besson's case, he almost goes for seriousness - if not in his storytelling (for it is rather funny at times and should be considered farce) then in his pretentious auteurness.

Perhaps not nearly Godardian as one might aspire it to be, and far from unpredictable (I don't think anyone need worry about giving away any surprise plot points that don't already hit one across the face about a mile away), Besson's film still flies as sort of a visually-snappy screwball comedy done to the tune of Wim Wenders. [06/01/07]

Heartwrenching at times, Sarah Polley's ode to the horrors of Alzheimers, Away From Her, is quietly terrifying in it's own way, but the apex of the film is the central performance by Julie Christie. Lost in a haze of uncertainty, Christie's Fiona dances through this film with a lighter-than-air heaviness that never seems to fall into cliche as would most performances in movies such as this. Rather dragging at times, Polley's film nonetheless comes alive with Christie's performance. At the same time though, there is another performance in this film that is just as devestating, just as heartbreaking, and that is Gordon Pinsent as Gordon, Fiona's suffering husband. It is Christie who has been geting all the accolades (and the obligitory Oscar nomination) but as we watch Pinsent's face contort with such anguish as the women he loves falls deeper and deeper into a disease with no way out, our heart's break with him. Perhaps a bit deadpan cinematically - though Polley does have a quietness akin to fellow Canadian Atom Egoyan - Away From Her shines through its performances of devestation. [01/22/08]

I must admit to having one hell of a time in deciding whether I truly liked this film or whether I thought it just all rubbish for the scrap heap. Okay perhaps that was a bit strong - after all one need only look at my score of 75 out of 100 to know which side of my mind I ended upon - but in fact I did have the devil of a time in wrangling this one in. On one hand, de Oliveira's film, which is an homage of sorts - perhaps coda is a better descriptive - to Belle de jour and is even dedicated to its writers Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, could not have looked more elegant. Picture perfect eye view from de Oliveira's stoic camera lens and very possibly an homage to Paris itself as well. On the other hand, this is probably a film that should have never even been made.

As if someone told us what happened to Holden Caulfield 40 years after The Catcher in the Rye or whatever became of poor Joseph K. or, God forbid, if someone had written a play where Godot actually finally shows up - exclaiming "better late than never!". Perhaps these are questions that all faithful readers ponder, but these are questions that need no answers. We need no closure on these subjects. This is why they still intrigue us years after first reading or seeing them, and this is exactly what de Oliveira does with Belle Toujours. He gives us one big fat concrete "this is what happened!" when all we need is to be left alone with our fantasies.

After all, de Oliveira has taken something he loves (and in the case of this critic, something which I love as well) - in this particular case, the story of Séverine and her embattled Husson - and by loving it so much has killed it, or at the very least has desecrated its very absurd holiness with the idea of restaging its after-the-credits whodunit. Yet in the end, even though he does place a sensible face where a sensible face certainly does not belong (although I suppose replacing the chilly Catherine Deneuve with the frantic Bulle Ogier is anything but putting a sensible face on something, but...) the 97 year old auteur, has made a beautifully succinct and vibrantly clever picture with the most loving of care. So what if it should have never been made. [06/14/07]

One certainly laments the - as Susan Sontag put it - Death of Cinema when one sees yet another CGI-dripping piece of mass hysteria'd fodder such as this, but I suppose, all-in-all, despite its obvious lack of cinematic desire (Zemeckis has never been the filmmaker even his overrated yet plausibly so mentor, Steven Spielberg is) and despite its obliviousness toward its source material (anything to get an animated naked Angelina Jolie up on screen?) and despite its use of a modern cinematographic technique with no redeeming factor whatsoever (either animate it or make it live action - make up your fucking minds people!) the man who once gave us what seemed like a giant cinematic leap forward in animation/live action coexistance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and then helped lead the way in creeping us all out with the mildly amusing yet visually disturbing "motion-capture" animation technique (Polar Express was a visual delight when the camera pulled away from all those ooky looking "dead" children's faces and concentrated on the train and the landscape) now hands us Beowulf and it really isn't all that bad - relatively speaking of course. There is even a bit of perverse pleasure one can take from the film - as if we just witnessed something we weren't alowed to see. Not that there is much to see, but... With a blind eye toward literary accuracy and the most bizarrely staged naked scene since Austin Powers (but Myers was doing his for laughs wasn't he?) Zemeckis' movie is certainly just another cog in Sontag's premonitory death knell, but its seeming inoffensiveness and lack of pretty much anything good or bad in its style leaves the movie as merely another bland example of how Hollywood has officially run out of ideas. Perhaps not new news at all, but just in case you had forgotten, there it is. Cinema - at least in the annals of modern Hollywood - just like Francisco Franco as that old SNL news punchline, is still dead. [11/18/07]

I must admit, seeing a sheep, one of the most docile animals on the freakin' planet, looking sad and dejected, as sheep often do, then suddenly lunging for a person's throat in sheer carniverous delight, well...there are not many things funnier. Really, I mean that. Funny as hell. Of course once you've seen this about three dozen times, the humour, I must admit, begins to wear a bit thin. But when you first witness it - funny as hell. Unfortunately, for everyone involved, that recurring toss-the-fake-sheep-at-the-actor routine is about all we get from Jonathan King's Kiwi faux terror plot.

King's film, taking a cue from genre buddies such as Shaun of the Dead and Bubba Ho-Tep, is a comedic attempt at the horror flick, repleat with all the cheesy nuances of the genre done with a whole new post-modern twist, and with homages to Night of the Living Dead, The Birds and even An American Werewolf in London, one certainly cannot take umbrage to King's love of cinema (or at least a particular wing of cinema) but still, one can surely criticize the outcome, which is choppy, rather one-note (albeit a funny note) and never seems to get going to the fullest of its potential - just sheepishly plodding along (did I just go there?). Sort of all bahhh and no bite (yep, I went there alright).

But then, Gene Shalit-esque quips aside, and no matter the directorial stumbling, it all comes back to seeing that adorable little stupid-looking animal with bloodlust in his eyes, and I laugh out loud (at least the first dozen or so times). Add to that exactly two and a half really funny other moments, and the inevitable sheep/sex joke and this little New Zealand comedy ain't half bad. Though, I think the term "were-sheep" when scrolled upon the final credits, was the one thing (even more than the carniverous lunging lambies) that made me laugh the loudest. Am I the only one with a hankering for mint jelly right about now? [07/07/07]

So far this film has been tossed of as a chick-flick Death Wish, and Ms. Foster as a vagina-swaggering Charles Bronson, and though these descriptives may very well be quite accurate - in the most superficial way - they fall quite short of what this film really is. Death Wish comparisons aside, taking more of a cue from Abel Ferrara's little-seen pseudo-exploitation flick Ms. 45, about a young mute woman who is raped not once but twice in one afternoon, and takes matters of revenge into her own hands as she mows down the men of Manhattan, Jordon's much more psychologically hip revenge thriller not only delves into the morally-trepidatious idea of revenge, but more than that, hands Jodie Foster a character that she can eat up the screen with - and she does just that.

With that said, the film does suffer from Jordon's usual bag of film school tricks, such as his dizzying camera perspective at Foster's fear of going outside after her brutal beating, and does have a bit of oh-duh-you-couldn't-see-that-coming running punchline, but parlays back with a brilliant performance from Foster and lingering questions of morality that no one really has the answers to. [09/29/07]

A satisfactory (well, almost) yet rather staid little spy thriller about the taking down of the reputed worst double agent in American history. Perhaps, though, the choice of thriller as an opening adjective is somewhat of a misnomer. Billy Ray's thriller is never all that thrilling of a thriller, considering that even if you do not already come into the theatre with a pre-knowledge of the Robert Hanssen case from 2001, the opening scene of John Ashcroft announcing the arrest of Hanssen should end even the minutest amount of anxiety.

Ray's only other attempt behind the director's lens was 2003's Shattered Glass, the story of a journalist who became infamous for fabricating over half his articles for The New Republic. That film, in which the atrociously ham-handed Hayden Christensen plays the lead make-up artist Stephen Glass, was perhaps a test run for the much more serious case of lies which is Breach. In comparison, Breach plays out as the stronger film (it is pretty bad when Ryan Phillippe - as the mole in search of a mole - seems a powerful presence when compared with the feyly superficial Anakin Skywalker) yet still ends up being no better than mediocre in its intensity - an attribute this is sorely needed in any spy thriller. Even The Good Shepherd, a film that lingers along in the most melancholy manner, is a far superior adventure to this one.

In fact the only thing keeping me from entirely ripping this film apart is the bravura performance from Chris Cooper, but then when does Chris Cooper not hand in a bravura performance. He can play everything from a flag-waving repressed homosexual (American Beauty) to a Socialist labor union organizer (Matewan) to an orchid-sniffing drug addict (Adaptation) to a hilariously parodied personification of the stupidity of a certain current White House resident (Silver City) with equal amounts of subtlety and ferocity which regularly get Cooper called the best character actor at work (or play) today. If only he had better material this time around. [02/18/07]

When one hears the name Cassavetes, one conjurs up all kinds of images of the seedy, underbelly of cinematic ghosts. Sharp-witted fast-talkers who elude specification and characterization. The real of the real. When one hears the term romantic comedy, one conjurs up images of sappy musical montages and even sappier fairytale endings. Dim-witted love-lorns who elude realism and naturalism. The make-believe of the make-believe. When one watches Broken English, the new romantic comedy from Zoe Cassavetes, who hath been sprung from the loins of the grandfather of independent realism, one cannot help but be both enthralled and repulsed.

Starring Parker Posey as a very atypical romantic lead (sexy and throaty but far from the perky Meg Ryan-esque manditories of the genre), Cassavetes film actually plays the tightrope line of two worlds quite nicely, with Posey's Nora Wilder as almost the perfect antithesis of all the Meg Ryans out there, depressed, dejected and nearly bottomed-out romantically speaking. Failing at love (and sex) over and over again (but never in that annoying cutesy save-me kinda way that makes so many rom-coms so damn nauseating). Posey is sort of a nafarious doppelganger of the expected romantic heroine. That is until the string suddenly snaps and we find ourselves in rom-com purgatory, flouncing to and fro the streets of Paris searching for our lost love (or at least our lost wouldbe love). Perhaps if we could set up a bell to go off about ten minutes from the end so everyone knows just when to make their hasty exit so as not to be too disappointed with one of the heirs of American indie cinema. Ding. [07/11/07]

Perhaps the less one knows about this film going in, the more prepared one is to absorb its often ridiculous but just as oft sincerity. The story of a lonely woman, played beyond expectations by the queen of trailer park broken hearts Ashley Judd (looking even hotter the more they try to de-glam her), and a lonely man, played with equal determination by the oft overlooked always perplexing Michael Shannon (one of the few to come out of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center with any artistic integrity). The most basic of stories. A simple girl meets boy tale. Oh yeah, there may be an infestation of brain-devouring insectoids right around the cheap motel room corner.

Perhaps not Shakespeare (or even Stephen King) but the chemistry of Judd and Shannon - and supported by Harry Connick Jr. as an abusive ex-hubby-cum-ex-con - and the direction of William "I've done nothing even remotely interesting since The Exorcist and even that wasn't all that good" Friedkin combine to form, perhaps not a great psychologically dark thriller, but an enjoyable romp in the world of crazy nonetheless. Hurray for Insanity - and yes, I capitalized that on purpose. Enjoy the film everybody. [06/13/07]

C'mon, how did this man (and it is based on a true...ish story) fool this many people (including for a while, the drama critic at the New York Times) into believing he was Stanley Freaking Kubrick? Ludicrous to the point of embarrassing, even John Malkovich - at his most bodacious bonkerocity - cannot salvage what is otherwise a big steaming pile of...well you get my meaning.

Now I usually don't get this up in arms about the badness of a movie - especially an expected second rate one such as this - but since it is (in a roundabout way) about one of the greatest auteurs to ever pick up a freaking camera, I suppose I overreact a bit. Granted, Malkovich is dead-on demented as the Kubrickian doppelganger and the Sirkian Gay Pride Parade palette actually works for such a flighty film (at least on a visual plane), but let's face facts - the story is contrived (true...ish or not), the script is well sub par (especially for such a versatile actor as Malkovich), the direction is pretty much non-existent (is there any shape to this film at all?) and when all these parts are put together, the sum of the whole equals bupkis. [06/12/07]

Although he could very well be construed as the Hitchcock of the French New Wave - a moniker that could be seen as either compliment or insult, depending on one's outlook, and one would guess at it being somewhat of an insult to a man that does not like comparisons to anyone, no matter how great they may be - Claude Chabrol has always left this critic rather cold - though that may be exactly the feel he has always gone for in his calculatory compartmentalized filmmaking style. Always my least favourite of the Cahier critics-cum-filmmakers (Rivette, Truffaut and Rohmer falling in place behind early Godard, if you must know my preference) Chabrol nonetheless still manages to usually weave together a rather spry, if not a bit slight, mystery-cum-black comedy, and A Comedy of Power is no different. Also no different than many of Chabrol's works is the centerpiece that is Isabelle Huppert - one of the finest (and still sexiest, even at 53) actresses working today. Perhaps nowhere near her more "serious" work, Huppert nonetheless breathes much needed life into this otherwise dry look at an Enron-esque scandal. In the end, Chabrol's film may not be Hitchcock (a good or bad thing? who knows?) but still - thanks mainly to the lovely Isabelle - it is more fun than one so inclined as to place Chabrol at the tail end of the Nouvelle Vague auteurs, might expect. [02/10/07]

What does one get when one takes the urbane mannerisms of Steve Carrell, the fluid beauty of Juliette Binoche and the vanity-edged energy of Dane Cook and tosses them all right smack dab in the middle of a John Cheever-esque white-bread-and-mayo family get-together? Well, in the case of Dan in Real Life, one gets a dreadfully dopey comedy of manners-cum-sex farce all wrapped up in the most caucasian of ribbons. Not a bad film per se, something even worse - middle-of-the-road. At least a really bad film has the audacity to be just that bad, but the vast majority of Hollywood flicks (a group which Dan in Real Life certainly falls into) are mere mediocrities disguised as cinema. Peter Hedges, making another attempt at strained familial situational comedy (his Pieces of April, starring a pre TomKat Katie Holmes, was slightly less unbearable) seems to have found himself hoplessly trapped in a viscous cycle that will keep circling unto itself again and again and again until he is finally thrown off the carousel once and for all, either at the crossroads of a career or at the bitter end of it. Face it Mr. Hedges, you are not Chekov, you are not Bergman, you are not even close. Perhaps about a bowl or two less of easy cliches and overdone metaphors and you might be onto something. Until then, keep up the mediocre work. [12/31/07]