Tribeca Film Festival: MOON Review
Co-writer/director Duncan Jones’ debut feature Moon (2009) is a modest but nonetheless exciting bit of derivative speculative fiction. As the film’s vision of the future is obviously cobbled together from a myriad sources, most importantly 2001: A Space Odyssey and...
Tribeca Film Festival: IN THE LOOP Review
Having not seen The Thick of It, the television show that co-writer/director Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop (2009) is a continuation of, I must admit that it was refreshing to see a dense war farce that pokes fun of the...
Tribeca Film Festival: NEWSMAKERS Review
Newsmakers (2009), Anders Banke’s remake of Johnnie To’s Breaking News (2004), is an old man’s film about a young man’s world. Banke and his four screenwriters’ moral outrage over the way the media has turned urban violence into a reality...
Tribeca Film Festival: PAINTBALL Review
Based on its loony concept—a bunch of paintball nuts go into the woods for a fun but hardcore game and end up getting picked off one-by-one when the game gets too real for comfort—director Daniel Benmayor and screenwriter Mario Schoendorff’s...
Tribeca Film Festival: THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL Review
You can tell from the gaudy banana yellow block print font of the opening credits of The House of the Devil (2009) that it’s very proud to be a retro bit of exploitation nostalgia but exactly what era it’s throwing...
Tribeca Film Festival: THE ECLIPSE Review
Playwright/writer/director Conor McPherson does not do subtle very well. Whether it’s a play like The Seafarer, where the devil plays poker with a man for the right to his soul or a film like The Actors (2003), where a struggling...
Simon's Dozen: The 12 Films I'm Gunning for at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival
Hey there, sports fans, long time, no talk. I just got the good word about being accredited at this year's Tribeca Film Festival so you better believe that I've by now not only highlighted the films I would be willing...
Exclusive Interview with Takashi Miike
Amazing Photo Taken from Oddity Cinema's Myspace page While I didn’t have the chance to see Takashi Miike’s spin on Yatterman, the ‘70s anime hero that many of you know and love, I will say this: the man knows how...
Exclusive Interview with Satoshi Kon
My interview with Satoshi Kon was not under ideal circumstances. The translator Lincoln Center provided had a bad case of nerves that day, I was also understandably a bit nervous, my tape recorder conked out on me a few minutes...
NYAFF Report: Interview with THEN SUMMER CAME Director Ryo Iwamatsu
From its first shot, Ryo Iwamatsu’s Then Summer Came struck me as a serious social critique disguised as a light romantic comedy. Joe Odagiri and Yoshio Harada play a father and son that are unable to communicate to each other...
HAMLET 2 Review
Instead of trying to shock its audience, co-writer/ director Andrew Fleming’s Hamlet 2 is determined to laugh at anyone still capable of being shocked. Only the desensitized are sane, laughing at the unbalanced outbursts of the caricatures of right wing,...
TFF Final Round-Up: THE COTTAGE, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and FERMAT'S ROOM pellet reviews
This is my final volley of reviews from this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Try not to cry. For the sake of my sanity and in order to get done as much as I can in as much time as I...
TFF: THE CALLER review
You know you’re in trouble when a film starring Frank Langella has reached its peak as Elliot Gould compares watching Langella to watching linoleum dry underneath a microscope…on acid. Yes, that was the one time when the press/industry audience at...
TFF: SOMERS TOWN review
In many ways, Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, his unassuming and innocuous follow-up to last year's critical smash This is England, pulls off what his much-touted last project couldn't. With Somers Town, the stakes are considerably lower as Meadows relates the...
Tribeca Film Festival (TFF): TOBY DAMMIT Review
By now, the films of Federico Fellini have become synonymous with spiritual and sexual caricatures, grotesque personal carnivals that conflate the everyday with ornate and fantastic tableaux of surreal decadence. His later surrealist works are unquestionably as convoluted as they...
Get Ready for....The 2008 Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca Film Festival and I don’t normally get along. Back in 2003, I was very much into the festival and was excited to see films like Takeshi Kitano’s “Zatoichi” and Tassos Boulmetis’ “A Touch of Spice,” the latter of...
Exclusive Interview with Stephen Chow
(From left to right: actor/director Stephen Chow, actress Xu Jiao and translator Diana Lee) This interview is unfortunately a result of mind-over-matter. That’s not a good thing. I ignored the reality of the situation and chose to believe I’d get...
FILM COMMENT SELECTS: Flash Point, J'entends Plus la Guitare and A Wonderful World Reviews
As promised, here is my final post on this year's Film Comment Selects program. The Film Society at Lincoln Center offered up a very mixed bag with no really excellent title to recommend it but enough terrific consolation titles to...
Be Kind, Rewind Review
While nostalgia has creeped into almost all of Michel Gondry’s films, Be Kind, Rewind is clearly the most wistful. Gondry’s previous fables (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Human Nature, The Science of Sleep) always had a darker edge that...
FILM COMMENT SELECTS: Boarding Gate and Searchers 2.0 Reviews
Who says I'm not prompt in my posts? You do, of course and that's why you're wrong. In any case, true to my word, here are my miniature, pellet-sized revews of Olivier Assayas' Boarding Gate and Alex Cox's Searchers 2.0....
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