Take This Waltz Movie Review

“New things get old.” So says an older woman to a group of younger women in Sarah Polley’s second directorial feature, Take This Waltz. The scene has three younger women showering, their bodies in full view of the camera, alongside a group of older women for whom time has quite clearly caught up with their bodies, wrinkled and sagging as they are. Yes, new things get old, whether we’re talking about the supple physical beauty of youth or a husband after five years of marriage. One of those young women needs to keep this refrain in mind as she considers an affair with a neighbor.

My Bloody Valentine Movie Review

My sixth grade teacher insanely allowed us to watch this movie in class. I remember we watched it in an adjoining room separate from the rest of the class. No one was forced to watch it. We were in that room by choice. If memory serves, my classmate Tom Ciavarella brought the film in. Tom, if you're out there, can you confirm this? I don't remember the movie having much effect on me or being all that scary. Watching it again I understood why.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

This is the 'hot' scene in the movie: a shirtless woman getting it on with a guy in a coal miner's outfit.

The 1981 slasher film My Bloody Valentine is so forgettable that only six days after watching it, I’m having trouble recalling a lot of the details – and I saw it once at age 11 when my sixth grade teacher inexplicably allowed us to watch it in class. It is so forgettable that it didn’t even manage to spawn a sequel due to its poor box office. However, it did manage to get a recent remake as part of the spate of horror film reboots that started about five or six years ago. The only truly remarkable thing about the film is that a small Canadian production with an entirely unknown cast and crew of amateurs was produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures.

Oscar-nominated Animated Short Films

The Oscar-nominated short films are playing in select cities around the country. In New York I saw them at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village.

This year Pixar’s almost annual entry in the Academy Awards’ Animated Short contest is a sweet little film called La Luna directed by Enrico Casarosa. It’s a touching little tale about a young boy venturing out to sea on a rowboat with his father and grandfather as they throw anchor and hoist a ladder up to the moon, climbing up with brooms in hand to sweep away the beautiful and twinkly stars that give the moon its glow. The film is bright and gorgeous and embodies nearly everything that Pixar has used to make a name for itself. It is one of the two best entries this year.

Barney's Version Movie Review: Jewish Angst in Montreal

Paul Giamatti is an actor who throws himself into his roles, becoming completely absorbed by his characters. Without the looks and stature of a traditional leading man, he has built an impressive resume of characters including John Adams in the eponymous HBO mini-series and has been ruefully passed over for a Best Actor Oscar nomination twice. No, make that three times now.

In Barney’s Version he plays Barney Parnofsky, a television producer and faux intellectual from Montreal who recalls the past decades of his life after the release of an incriminating book by a retired detective that implicates him in a 20 year old missing persons case. It’s little surprise that Giamatti and the film missed out on the Oscar season (with the exception of a nod for makeup) because it was barely marketed, had no wide release until earlier this year and simply wasn’t put on the radar of enough Academy members. That’s a real shame because despite the film’s flaws, and they are many, it is more than deserving of both audience and critical attention.

Incendies Movie Review

This film will open commercially in the United States on 22 April 2011.

Immediately after being born, an infant child is tattooed with three black dots on his heel. This act serves no function except as a narrative device so that at various points throughout the film, the audience (and later a character) will recognize who he is. The Canadian film Incendies, which was nominated for the Foreign Language Film Oscar this year, is built on a series of absurd coincidences contrived specifically for the purposes of completing a narrative.

The woman who gives birth to that baby is Nawal Marwan played by Lubna Azabal who may be somewhat familiar to American audiences after a small role in Body of Lies and in the Oscar nominated film from the Palestinian Territories, Paradise Now. Nawal is an Arab Christian from an unspecified Middle Eastern country, though it bears some historical resemblance to Lebanon. The film is written and directed by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve based on a play of the same name by Wajdi Mouawad, a Canadian born in Lebanon.