A.V. Club Blog

Movie Of The Day:

To Each His Own Cinema (dir. Various Artists): Whenever a movie at the festival is projected on digital video, the company responsible for the equipment, Christie, is emblazoned on the screen with the Videodrome-esque tagline, “Welcome To The New Reality.” And every time, it makes my teeth grind, not only because I’m about to see a movie in a format that looks substandard 95% of the time, but because of the blunt (and, sadly, true) assertion that celluloid is on its last legs. I’ve always been critical of the speed at which the digital revolution has taken hold, because the “new reality” hadn’t nearly caught up with the old one in terms of quality, but the technology has improved and presumably will continue to improve until the differences are negligible. But the zeroes and ones simply can’t approximate the tactile wonder of celluloid...

To read Noel's Day Eight, click here.

Movie Of The Day:

Angel (dir. François Ozon): About half the films in Ozon’s prolific career—he seems capable, in quantity if not quality, of rivaling his hero Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s output—pay tongue-in-cheek, feature-length homage to other movies: See The Sea to Hitchcock, Sitcom to John Waters, Water Drops On Burning Rocks to Fassbinder, 8 Women to Technicolor musicals, etc. His latest, Angel, is a cheeky nod to the lavish David O. Selznick productions of the ‘30s and ‘40s—rich in color and period decadence, swelling with florid melodrama and romance, and concerned with the dreams of a plucky ingénue who goes from rags to riches....

Movies Of The Day:

A Girl Cut In Two (dir. Claude Chabrol) and Mad Detective (dir. Johnnie To)

Both Claude Chabrol and Johnnie To have reached the phase of their careers where they’re cranking out good-to-great movies every year or two, sometimes with minimal ambition, and sometimes with a little more juice. Because both of them are so good at what they do, it’s hard sometimes to distinguish immediately when they’ve delivered one of those mini-masterpieces, as opposed to just another finely made genre exercise. Chabrol’s A Girl Cut In Two is pretty much the latter, but at that, it’s nothing to shrug off. Ludivine Sagnier plays the title character, a TV presenter who develops a crush on grizzled celebrity author François Berléand around the same time... read more

To read Noel's Day Seven, click here.

Movie Of The Day:

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (dir. Sidney Lumet): It’s hard to define what, exactly, the Sidney Lumet touch might be, since his films are relatively plain-Jane stylistically, without any obvious hallmarks that would make his screen credit superfluous. Lumet’s films are, by and large, defined by their uninflected realism; he’s not the sort of director who expresses himself through handheld cameras, showy tracking shots, or elaborate lighting schemes. With a focus on character and performance, Lumet classics like 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince Of The City, and The Verdict are quite firmly set in the world we know, and he...

Movie Of The Day:

Lou Reed’s Berlin (dir. Julian Schnabel)

Lou Reed remained fairly prolific in the three decades after he left The Velvet Underground, but his solo albums—outside of maybe Transformer—never exactly set the world afire in the way that V.U.’s body of work did. The Blue Mask, New Sensations and New York are well-liked by many, but even among Reed fans, his solo stuff tends to be fairly divisive, with vocal proponents and opponents of everything from the avant-noise experiment Metal Machine Music to the post-Springsteen mainstream-rock push Coney Island Baby. (The latter being one of my favorites.)

Berlin is especially controversial among... read more

Movies Of The Day:

Across The Universe (dir. Julie Taymor) and I’m Not There (dir. Todd Haynes)

How is it possible for one of the premiere theatrical stylists of our era to make a movie filled with some of the most memorable pop songs ever written, and yet only achieve a few scattered moments of transcendence? After seeing the trailer for Across The Universe months ago, I was prepared for Julie Taymor’s hodgepodge of ‘60s clichés and drippy reinterpretations of Beatles songs. But I was also—going by the 30-second burst of delirious surrealism that ends the... read more

Movie Of The Day:

Stuck (dir. Stuart Gordon): Now we’re talkin’. I’ve seen better movies at this festival—very few of them, however—but none have left me feeling as exhilarated as Gordon’s savagely funny black comedy, which traffics in B-movie grime without a whiff of Grindhouse-style self-consciousness. The hook is a doozy, ripped from a tabloid headline that sounds like urban legend. Back in 2003, a woman from Ft. Worth was involved in a hit-and-run incident in which she hit a homeless man with her car and left him to die in her garage for two days with his head lodged in the windshield. This might sound like the makings of a lurid psychodrama, but Gordon (whose career includes the cult favorite Re-Animator and the underrated David Mamet adaptation

Movie Of The Day: Margot At The Wedding (dir. Noah Baumbach):
It’s going to be a good world to live in if Noah Baumbach can keep knocking out light-yet-intense, short-story-ish films like The Squid And The Whale and Margot At The Wedding every couple of years. Baumbach’s latest doesn’t have the immediacy or emotional impact of Squid, which dropped viewers into the middle of a crumbling academic family and let us fend for ourselves. But Margot works a similar combination of off-handed humor and interesting-but-prickly people—none pricklier than the title character, a strong-willed, socially useless writer played by Nicole Kidman. The movie cleaves to the dynamic between Kidman and her son, a teenage effete who’s having trouble grappling... read more

Movie Of The Day:

Paranoid Park (dir. Gus Van Sant): The last four Gus Van Sant movies—Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, and this gorgeous reverie on adolescence—have the quality of a dream, slipping so fluidly through time and space that they practically float on air. Van Sant had an artistic awakening after hitting bottom with Finding Forrester and he continues to refine a filmmaking style that initially owed much to Hungarian director Béla Tarr, but now seems unmistakably his own. If the new and improved Van Sant has a flaw, it’s that his caressing camera tends to view humans from a cold aesthetic distance and the lack of intimacy flattens them out psychologically. Perhaps by tethering the movie to some measure of conventional plot tension—the young hero’s involvement in the accidental death...

Movie Of The Day:

Atonement (dir. Joe Wright): I was left curiously unmoved by this adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel. And yet I wonder if that can reasonably be called a shortcoming, since the question of whether or not it moved me personally isn’t a fair denial of the film’s rich themes and impeccable execution. A sweeping historical drama in the English Patient/Cold Mountain mode—no small coincidence that Anthony Minghella, the director of those two films, makes a cameo appearance—Atonement offers up the stock romantic majesty of lovers kept apart by war and treachery, yet it ultimately plays more to the head than the heart. From the beginning, the film deceptively draws you into...