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Mention the name Giuseppe Tornatore and you think immediately of that paean to the movies, Cinema Paradiso (1988), and then three other nostalgia-tinged remembrances of an Italy now long gone, The Star Maker (1995), The Legend of 1900 (1998) and Malèna (2000). All of this makes The Unknown Woman - Tornatore's latest film and first since 2000 - surprising viewing: it is gritty, (almost) completely devoid of sentimentality, and contemporary to the point of being a hot button movie." In a new interview now up on GreenCine, Nick Dawson talks with Tornatore about "his all-consuming love of cinema, the strong female figures in his films, and his long-running working partnership with Ennio Morricone." Read article >>
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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Control, Diva, and oodles more.
- What We're Watching: Cook, Debaters and Darfur Now.
- Contest: Wild West Comedy Show.
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"Even if you have no interest in Joy Division, this picture is worth seeing for the unsentimental empathy and passion of the moviemaking," wrote Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun of Anton Corbijn's film about Ian Curtis. A.O. Scott agrees: "You don’t have to know anything about Joy Division to grasp the mysterious sorrow at its heart." And Shawn Levy of the Oregonian wonders, "Can a movie about such a fellow and such a fate be lovely? And can it uplift? Control is and, in its artfulness, does." Shot in appropriately moody black and white.
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In his original four-star review of Jean-Jacques Beineix's cinema du look in 1982, Rogert Ebert called it "one of the best thrillers of recent years but, more than that, it is a brilliant film, a visual extravaganza that announces the considerable gifts of its young director...He has made a film that is about many things, but I think the real subject of DIVA is the director's joy in making it. " Then upon revisiting it as the film was restored and recently re-released (and now out on DVD), Ebert still finds "it glistens in its original magnificence." If not all critics think it's aged quite that well, we think Diva is still dazzling and transporting. |
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If you ever thought that Buddhist Zen preachers are unassuming people who hold the secrets to happiness, and who lead quiet lives, devoting themselves to meditation in order to achieve enlightenment, then How To Cook your Life might convince you otherwise. The film's subject, well-known Bay Area-based “zen chef” Edward Espe Brown (a zen preacher himself), appears not only to have achieved relative stardom status, but also to be a successful businessman.
Having studied under Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who ordained Brown as a priest in 1971, the zen chef has...r ead review >> |
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The recently filmed (for cable-TV) version of the famous Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin In The Sun and last year's "Oscar Bait," Denzel Washington-helmed The Great Debaters were released to video on the same day. After watching both within hours of each other, a comparison seems in order. The former was generally greeted well by critics (and the public: the Broadway version was a rare "hot ticket" for a non-musical play, due no doubt to the casting of a certain Mr. Diddy). The latter, however, was given a shrug of indifference by the public and by quite a few critics. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that movie-goers missed out on something wonderful... read review >> |
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Having first explored humanitarian crises while starring in the eye-opening Hotel Rwanda (2004), actor Don Cheadle is once again one of the main characters in the real-life stories around which the documentary Darfur Now, also a film about genocide, revolves. The film by Ted Braun follows six different people in their very different but equally crucial efforts to deal with the horrible atrocities taking place in Darfur, Sudan: Cheadle uses his celebrity status to .... read review >> |
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