The A.V. Club - Review

Film: Review:Broken Embraces

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:07:00 -0600

Blind writer Lluís Homar begins his day memorably in the opening scene of Broken Embraces. Having been helped across the street by a beautiful woman, he successfully turns her offer to read him the news into a seduction. When their encounter ends, he looks satisfied but unmoved. Warned against letting strangers into his house by his manager (Blanca Portillo), he says that everything that could happen to him has already happened. He lives life as an epilogue, remembering a time before he lost his sight, when he directed acclaimed films under his own name instead of hacking them out ...

Film: Review:The Blind Side

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:06:00 -0600

Sports movies have a long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity. But The Blind Side, based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book, finds a new low. In the character of “Big Mike” (real life success story Michael Oher, played by Quinton Aaron), a poor, undereducated teenager later groomed into a top-tier offensive lineman, the film suggests a gentle, oversized puppy in need of adoption. (The family that takes him in literally picks him up from the streets during a rainstorm, like a stray. All that’s missing are the children pleading, “Mom ...

Film: Review:Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:05:00 -0600

Not since Snakes On A Plane has the line between movie and Internet meme been as confused as it is with Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage’s remake of the Abel Ferrara shocker Bad Lieutenant. When the project was first announced at Cannes, it immediately triggered reaction along the lines of “What kind of crazy train wreck is that going to be?” And once the wondrously insane teaser trailer went viral, it turned into, “Oh, that kind of a crazy train wreck.” So what about the movie? Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans—the subtitle makes it charmingly unwieldy ...

Film: Review:Planet 51

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:04:00 -0600

Through the same mysterious alchemy that gave the moviegoing public back-to-back CGI insect adventures (A Bug’s Life and Antz), deep-sea fish adventures (Finding Nemo and Shark Tale), and films about escaped zoo animals returning to nature (Madagascar and The Wild), 2009 has produced two films about peaceful alien civilizations disrupted by human invaders. The first, May’s Battle For Terra, was a cheaply animated but heady, ponderous think-piece about the nature of humanity and the causes of war. The second, the new comic adventure Planet 51, is Terra’s opposite in every way. Its visuals are far more sophisticated ...

Film: Review:The Sun

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:03:00 -0600

Following portraits of Lenin (Taurus) and Hitler (Moloch), Russia’s Aleksandr Sokurov shifts his gaze to the land of the rising sun, where bunker-bound Emperor Hirohito (Issei Ogata) is waiting out the end of the Pacific war. Shooting in candlelit half-dark so extreme that the subtitles often cast the brightest glow—an effect that will likely prove impossible to translate to the small screen—Sokurov zooms in on Hirohito’s U.S.-mandated un-deification, the key to breaking the will of Japan’s notoriously tenacious troops. Intriguingly, Sokurov takes Hirohito’s renunciation of divine status at face value; ceaselessly twitching ...

Film: Review:Red Cliff

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:02:00 -0600

Financed for $80 million, the most money ever allotted to a Chinese production, the immense period action epic Red Cliff is John Woo’s first film in the six years since Paycheck ended—for the time being, anyway—his rocky sojourn in Hollywood. From the looks of it, the cultural exchange cut both ways: Woo’s flair for slo-mo theatrics has become a common visual stamp for Hollywood actioners, while his longtime interest in Western themes found a natural home in America, even though the blockbuster conventions of movies like Mission: Impossible II often eclipsed those themes. Bringing all his ...

Film: Review:The Missing Person

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:01:00 -0600

There’s a mass of incongruities—some clever, others shockingly ill-conceived—in Noah Buschel’s The Missing Person, a neo-noir that attempts to update the genre while providing a self-conscious throwback to its tarted-up dialogue and grimy ambiance. Bridging the gap between eras is Michael Shannon, a strange, exciting character actor whose very presence tends to put a movie on edge; whenever he popped up as a mentally unstable truth-teller in Revolutionary Road, the film’s brittle marital drama suddenly dipped into chaos. Shannon is the perfect actor to play Buschel’s hard-drinking gumshoe. He can swill gin and mumble ...

Film: Review:The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0600

New Moon goes through great pains to present itself as a descendent of Romeo And Juliet, except without all that icky tragedy in the end. There are warring clans—in this case, werewolves and vampires—a rival suitor, tragic miscommunication, and at the center of it all, two self-absorbed teenage lovers. Throw in a revenge subplot and an ancient, power-hungry clan of evil Italian vampires, and it all sounds potentially thrilling. But in spite of its wealth of conflict, New Moon suffers from a dearth of accompanying tension and excitement, thanks to the increasingly tedious relationship at its center. After ...

Film: Review:Mammoth

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0600

Rarely has a filmmaker experienced as rapid a rise and fall as Swedish director Lukas Moodysson. His intimate 1999 romance Fucking Åmål (a.k.a. Show Me Love) and his sprawling 2000 comedy Together were praised for their warmth and insight. Then he swapped optimism for pessimism with 2002’s heartbreaking (but artful) Lilya 4-Ever. After that, Moodysson tested audiences with the intentionally repellant A Hole In My Heart and the aggressively experimental Container, and in just a few short years, he went from being a favorite of critics and audiences to being a director whose name evokes winces ...

Books: Review:Gregory Maguire: Matchless: A Christmas Story