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The Counterfeiters, which just won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and is opening slowly nationwide, is based on true events: the Nazis planned to destabilize the American and British economies by flooding the markets with fake dollars and pounds. And they enlisted prisoners in concentration camps to counterfeit the bills. This presents a dark dilemma to the prisoners: cooperate and survive - or sabotage the project and possibly pay with their lives. "I don't think there is the right way to behave in a situation like that," director Stefan Ruzowitzky tells Michael Guillén in a new interview up on GreenCine. "This is something I learned from doing research and reading a lot of autobiographies. They all agree that it was so difficult in the camps to do the right thing and, if you wanted to do the right thing, often it led to catastrophe and disaster because the whole system was so perverted." Read the full article >> |
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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Darjeeling, Emperor, and oodles more.
- What We're Watching: Silly Age, Adam's Apples, Blue State.
- Explore: Oscar Live Blog, rehashed; GC Daily shout-out.
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Wes Anderson's road - or train - movie The Darjeeling Limited gave us the typically great soundtrack and varying reactions, but overall critics seemed to find it a sign of the director's maturation. "A picture that certain Brits might call 'a grower'," wrote Premiere's Glenn Kenny, "more moving and funny the more I think about it." Adds AO Scott: "a high-end, high-toned tourist adventure. I don’t mean this dismissively; it would be hypocritical of me to deny the delights of luxury travel to faraway lands. And Anderson’s eye for local color is meticulous and admiring." Touching to see Owen Wilson's return, and it offers an amusing cameo from Bill Murray. |
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Bernardo Bertolucci's epic won nine Academy Awards, unexpectedly sweeping every category in which it was nominated—quite a feat for a challenging, multilayered work directed by an Italian and starring an international cast. Criterion now brings it to us in a four DVD set that is in itself rather epic. Just a few of the highlights: An all-new, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro; audio commentary featuring Bertolucci, producer Jeremy Thomas, screenwriter Mark Peploe, and composer-actor Ryuichi Sakamoto; four, yes four, documentaries, and new interviews. |
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Though the release date for this Cuban film was surely coincidental, it's hard not to think of the impliications of Fidel Castro's retirement when watching The Silly Age, a sweet little film set in 1958, as that island nation stood on the cusp of Castro's revolution. GC's Craig Phillips deemed it "certainly charming, and even if the coming-of-age story itself isn't all that remarkable, I still found the end profoundly moving.".... read review here >> |
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This funny, irreverent film by Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen will keep you laughing from its start, as soon as Adam ( Ulrich Tomsen) steps off a bus, keys it as it passes by, and then meets Ivan ( After the Wedding's Mads Mikkelsen). We immediately know Adam is a bad-ass con fresh out of prison, sent to Ivan's care for 'rehabilitation,' and that things will quickly go awry. Adam, you see, is a Neo-Nazi while Ivan, a devout reverend, is as Christian as they come... read review here >>
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As a writer/director, Marshall Lewy had made only three short films before his full-length debut with the remarkable Blue State, about as timely and daring a movie as you are likely to see. It's not perfect, and it probably bites off more than it can properly chew, let alone digest. Yet, after all the documentaries we've viewed over the past eight years, during which has occurred the steepest, most noticeable--from without and within--decline in the reputation of the good ol' USA, someone has at last had the balls to make a narrative feature about this. It almost seems beside the point that Lewy has turned out a good movie--funny, decent, political, romantic, humane. The fact that he's managed to address pointedly and honestly... read review here >> |
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2008 Oscar Winners & Noms
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