War Won’t Tear Us Apart
In A Very Long Engagement, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fervid need to turn everything into fussy, over-processed whimsy is wholly incongruous with its primary subject: war.
Foreign-Language Films
The King(dom) of Comedy
The ever-divisive Lars von Trier is not known as a storyteller, and that’s the main reason his miniseries The Kingdom – which was released on DVD in November – is so surprising.
Tagged: Foreign-Language Films, Horror, Lars von Trier, Reviews, Riget, Television, The Kingdom
A Circle of Loss
Spider Forest is at once lovely and brutal, delicate and hard, sympathetic and unforgiving. It has a feel both foreign and familiar, like the image in the movie of a girl whose body rises into the air feet-first, as if God’s hand gently plucked her by the ankle and took her into the heavens.
Tagged: Dramas, Foreign-Language Films, Horror, Reviews, Song Il-gon, Spider Forest
The Horror. The Horror!
As flawed as it is and even though its freshness and shock value have been diminished by imitation and time, Eyes Without a Face still works amazingly well – primal, raw, troubling, and real. Its authenticity makes it superior to 95 percent of horror movies, and it illustrates how horror operates even when it’s not terrifying.
Abandon All Hope
Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum has so much to say that it can’t survive as a narrative. Still, slogging through it might be worth the effort if the movie spoke meaningfully to the human condition, but the essence of the film is distilled misanthropy, and its flavor is so outrageously bitter that you immediately reject it.
The Silent Eye
The 2002 Chinese horror film The Eye is unfortunately familiar – “unfortunately” because the writing-directing Pang brothers are expert at creating scenes of skin-chilling creepiness but, in this film at least, don’t give the audience anything more.
Tagged: Foreign-Language Films, Horror, Reviews, The Eye
Watering Dead Flowers
Takeshi Kitano’s Fireworks is remarkable for many reasons, but its greatest achievement is taking a character capable of extreme violence and sweet tenderness and absolutely nothing in between and making him believable and rich. The feat looks all the more impressive considering the character’s perpetual mask of blank impassivity.
Tagged: Dramas, Fireworks, Foreign-Language Films, Reviews, Takeshi Kitano
Vampires and Sacrifice
Werner Herzog uses all the trappings of the story of Count Drac-oooo-lah in Nosferatu the Vampyre but doesn’t approach it as a tale of terror. Instead, he turns Bram Stoker’s basic plot (and F.W. Murnau’s silent classic) into a contemplative study of sacrifice and tragedy.
Exercises in Revulsion
Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible is such a formal accomplishment that its already repellent content becomes even more so.