Blue Is the Warmest Color Movie Review

Is a three hour running time for a romantic drama a little indulgent? In general, I’d say it probably is, but there’s no one size fits all answer. If the story is suited to it and it’s compelling enough to carry you through, then why not? The French drama Blue Is the Warmest Color, winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, takes cinematic romantic love to rarely touched emotional depths. The epic length didn’t feel so long to me, which must be viewed as testament to the humane and sensitive direction by Abdellatif Kechiche and the incredible and brave performances by the two female leads, Adéle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux.

sex, lies, and videotape Movie Review

Though this was the second time I’ve seen sex, lies, and videotape, it really felt like the first. The first time I saw it (probably in college or maybe even high school) I thought it was a little dull and unmemorable. I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. Sundance Audience Award winner? Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner? But then priorities and taste change and suddenly a character-driven drama filmed on a low budget about a man (Peter Gallagher) cheating on his wife (Andie MacDowell) with her sister (Laura San Giacomo) and the old friend (James Spader) who comes to visit and, with his eccentric personality, serves as a catalyst for change is a lot more interesting. Maybe when I was a teenager I was hoping for a lot more out of the sex part of the title. There’s plenty of sex talk, but not a lot of flesh. Like I said, priorities change.

Amour Movie Review

Michael Haneke makes films that I deeply admire much more than I truly love. They are technically sound. It is clear he has a profound natural ability to use the camera to create chilling scenes, empty spaces that suggest isolation, and stories that reveal various elements of the human condition. Whether it’s the cruel sadism of Funny Games, the psychosexual power of The Piano Teacher, the paranoia of Caché, or the wicked punishment of collective guilt in The White Ribbon, Haneke’s films are always challenging, never made for easy viewing, and rarely offering anything short of material for endless discussion with your cinephile friends.

The Tree of Life Movie Review

Do yourself a favor if you’re going to watch The Tree of Life: set aside a block of time during which you won’t be interrupted. This is a movie that needs to be experienced in its entirety as single entity. It is not a traditional narrative film. Containing experimental elements, it is more a philosophical exploration of life’s origins and the binary nature of the world we live in. If you’re open to new experiences and ready for a thought-provoking movie, then by all means give it a shot. If, on the other hand, this doesn’t sound like your cup of tea or you read some kind of plot description somewhere that sounded like it’s a good story, then turn back now. This isn’t for you.

Classic Film Review: Roland Joffe's The Mission

As a staunch non-believer I’ve only ever encountered two films that gave me a sense of what religious fulfillment is. Not that I was spiritually awakened or felt a desire to convert – nothing of the kind – but that the film was so skilled at conveying the significance of faith in God’s love without being preachy, that I understood through character development and acting what it is to find redemption and peace. And isn’t that what the vast majority of narrative cinema is about? It’s meant to provide you a glimpse into other people’s lives for a couple of hours and make you believe in their beliefs.

The first of these was The Mission, directed by Roland Joffe, and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. I first watched it many years ago while I was in high school or college and I wasn’t sure if a second viewing so many years later would still produce the same effect in me. The difference this time was that I had greater appreciation for the craft of the film, which most likely subconsciously influenced my original belief that it was a great film.

Modern Classic Movie Review: Pulp Fiction

As a special treat to celebrate my 100th movie review posted to this site (I've actually written more than 100, but they haven't all been posted here) I decided to write a full length review of the film that got me interested in film in the first place.

Additionally, over the next few weeks I will post, in pieces, the full analysis I did on the film several years ago. Keep your eyes open for that starting this week.

It’s amazing to me that after roughly twenty viewings from beginning to end plus an exhaustive shot-by-shot study of it, there are still moments in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction that make me smile, chuckle or even downright surprise me: The Wolf’s smile of appreciation for the delicious coffee served up by Jimmy; Mia Wallace’s tomato joke to break the tension after an intense scene. Incredibly, watching it again for this review, I even pulled out something new that I had never picked up on before. And it wasn’t even a minor detail, but one that ties into one of the major themes of the film.

List: Top Ten Palme d'Or Winners

The Cannes Film Festival is always an exciting time for seeing what's on the world cinema docket for the coming year. This year's festival is a few weeks away and the lineup is set. In addition to new films from Cannes regulars Mike Leigh (Palme d'Or 1996 for Secrets and Lies; Best Director 1993 for Naked), Abbas Kiarostami (Palme d'Or 1997 for Taste of Cherry) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Best Director 2006 for Babel) there is a sequel to Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun (1994 Grand Prix winner), a new film from Doug Liman based on the memoir of Valerie Plame.

Burnt by the Sun 2 picks up the story of Col. Kotov several years after his execution (he was never executed on screen, but a post-script revealed he'd been shot) as a soldier in Stalin's army fighting back the Nazis in WWII.

Liman's Fair Game stars Naomi Watts as Plame, the former CIA operative, whose identity was revealed by Washington Post reporter Robert Novak, and Sean Penn as her husband Joseph Wilson who claims the Bush administration leaked her identity in order to discredit him after he criticized the Iraq invasion. Liman had a promising start to his career with his hilarious debut Swingers followed up by the Pulp Fiction-for-kids Go and then the first in the Bourne trilogy. After that he started a two-film downward spiral that culminated in the horrifically received (16% on the Tomato Meter) Jumper. I don't imagine his new film will be much more than standard Hollywood boilerplate conspiracy theory. And that Liman has established himself as a premiere action director, I would expect this new film to have several unnecessary action sequences thrown in for good measure. Don't look for any awards to be handed to this film.

As for the rest of the line up, I have no idea. It's virtually impossible to make any kind of prediction about the festival until it kicks off and we hear what critics, producers, executives and attendees are saying.

So with that in mind, I decided to throw together a list. I promised lists at the beginning and I haven't delivered any yet. Well I looked over the list of Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winners and selected what I think are the 10 best, listed below alphabetically. In so doing I discovered how deficient my knowledge of foreign films is. I've really only seen about half the big winners of the last 60 years. Hopefully I will correct that one day and revise this list to reflect it.

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (2007) dir. Cristian Mungiu - The herald of a New Romanian Cinema. This is a harrowing story of a young woman who enlists the help of a close friend to obtain an illegal abortion during Ceausescu's reign.
Barton Fink (1991) dir. Joel and Ethan Coen - Possibly the Coens' best film. It's certainly the darkest. About a New York playwright who tries his hand at Hollywood screenwriting on the eve of WWII.
Blow-Up (1967) dir. Michelangelo Antonioni - A brilliant comment on the truth and nature of photography, especially as it is delivered in the medium of motion pictures. A photographer thinks he's photographed a murder, but the blown up photo isn't clear enough to reveal truth while his own investigation fails to turn up evidence outside his own observation.
The Conversation (1974) dir. Francis Ford Coppola - Brilliant filmmaking in this exploration of paranoia in a post-Watergate America.
MASH (1970) dir. Robert Altman - Hilarious anti-war satire set during the Korean War but ostensibly a commentary on Vietnam.
The Mission (1986) dir. Roland Joffe - A Spanish slave trader in colonial South America does penance and slowly converts to the Jesuit order to help bring Christianity to the native people. This is one of the best films you've probably never seen.
Paris, Texas (1984) dir. Wim Wenders - A man is found wandering in the desert and brought to his brother. He can't make peace with himself until he finds his ex-wife and asks her forgiveness for his past treatment of her.
Pulp Fiction (1994) dir. Quentin Tarantino - Surely you know this one.
Taxi Driver (1976) dir. Martin Scorsese - Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle goes a little funny in the head trying to clean up the streets of New York.
The Third Man (1949) dir. Carol Reed - In a divided post-WWII Vienna, Harry Lime has been killed just before his close friend arrives from America. It turns out Harry has been involved in a black market trade of penicillin that has left many children horribly disfigured. One of the best of the original films noirs.