A tribe of subtitled vampires strategically targets the northernmost town in the U.S., Barrow, Alaska, hunkered down for a sunless month, free rein for nocturnal bloodsuckers. The majestic clouds and snowscapes on the last day of light ignite hope for a sense of style, but the superhuman strength and speed …
Fargo: the Next Generation? Perhaps, if by that you mean “brisk, violent, and largely unsentimental about the depths of human folly.” It’s also the least preening of Summer 2011’s many raunch comedies, content to spend its time among the genuinely raunchy. A would-be white-trash criminal mastermind (Danny McBride) straps a …
Documentary about the importance of running.
Honest-to-gosh Western, a rare sight in the 21st Century, thick as fleas fifty years earlier, when the original 3:10 arrived. The remake is done in the decadent style of shades-of-brown realism, luxuriantly whiskered and shaggy-haired, yet preening and grandiose, with amplified passions, topographical sprawl, and an overblown (and significantly altered) …
A documentary about a middle-aged white man's killing of a young black man after a confrontation at a gas station, and the subsequent investigation and trial.
Claire Denis’s gray portrait of black Parisians, a grizzled train engineer and his full-grown daughter at the center of it. There’s a good deal of riding around to cool melodica-ruled music, and an abundance of lifelike little details, but it never quite comes into focus. With Alex Descas, Mati Diop, …
Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) uses Max Ophüls’s dazzling La Ronde as a blueprint for this cluttered globe-hopping melodrama featuring an all-star international cast in various stages of grief and infidelity. The set-up is exquisite: the use of architecture and highly reflective surfaces function as serviceable tributes …
A night and a day with a budding Lolita. Delphine Zentout, notwithstanding her majestic chest, is a credible fourteen-year-old -- no Norma Shearer playing Juliet. But what then? Ragged and draggy realism, laden with French worldliness: "Dip your wick three times in the same girl and forget it." Directed by …
Moody and delicate — and imposing, if you surrender to it. Eric Mendelsohn’s second feature (Judy Berlin came out in 1999) considers a summer day in suburban Long Island. Kasper Tuxen’s light-entranced imagery wraps sensual sites around people whose feelings often fail to find words: an alienated husband (Elias Koteas), …