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The dramatic portrayal of Buddhist lifestyles and spiritual truths is perhaps more difficult to accomplish in an exciting way than depictions of Western religious practices and stories, because the Dharma is so geared to inner transformation. And while enlightenment or satori may be one of the most profound experiences a human being can undergo, it doesn't exactly translate easily into compelling cinema. But Simon Augustine's found a list of films, from both the East and the West, that comment in some way upon the teachings of the Buddha. List: The Most Spiritually Affecting Buddhist Movies >>
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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Heartbeat Detector, Spaced, and more.
- What We're Watching: Vampyr, Satantango, The Exile.
- Explore: Baghead and Full Battle Rattle.
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"It's a thin line between 20th-century Nazism and 21st-century corporate culture in Heartbeat Detector, Nicolas Klotz's rewardingly chilly psychological thriller," wrote Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly of this sort of French Michael Clayton. "A rich, vexing experience," adds the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips. And James Van Maanen on GC Daily found the film "full of strange and interesting connections, made by visuals, sounds and music but mostly by ideas and history." |
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GreenCine's Craig Phillips :"After several years of hearing about a wonderfully quirky British show called Spaced, and then hearing still more about it when its creators went on to make the highly regarded genre-busting film comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz... now at long last comes a proper US release of the entire series. Fans of those films should rejoice, for herein is the germination of everything director Edgar Wright and company would subsequently produce, and yet may never quite top. For those many of us who are already familiar with how sharply funny Simon Pegg and his frequent compadre Nick Frost can be, it is Jessica Stevenson who might be the real revelation to Americans here... [read more]" |
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One of the all-time great filmmakers, the Danish-born Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968) made what Paul Schrader termed "transcendental" films... In this country, he's primarily known for five films: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964). Vampyr is typically ranked the lowest of these first five masterworks. It was produced with a comparatively lower budget and may not look as professional as the others, and it also has the loosest, most ramshackle plot of the five. But I suspect the real reason for its lower status is the fact that it's a horror film. I generally rank it not only as one of the four or five greatest horror films, but also as one of the greatest films ever made, regardless of genre. It's a masterpiece that still gives me the chills... read the review >> |
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After several delays, this one finally arrives on DVD. Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has always been notorious for his long, slow, and exceedingly bleak cinematic explorations of life in the former Soviet bloc. But the mere two hours and twenty five minutes that one of his most celebrated films, Werckmeister Harmonies (made six years earlier, in 2000), takes for its poetically bizarre visual symbolisms to unfold, are nothing compared to Sátántángo. With a total running time of seven hours and fifteen minutes, Sátántángo ceremoniously deserves to be called "epic." Nonetheless, as skeptical as the film's duration may make a viewer, Tarr's rendering of the last days of a collective farm during the end of communist-era Hungary is so engaging and so breathtakingly beautiful that... read review >> |
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Made in 1991, The Exile (La Frontera) marks Chilean director Ricardo Larraín's first attempt at feature filmmaking, a debut so impressive that when it was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1992 it won the Silver Berlin Bear for outstanding first film. The story revolves around a math teacher from Santiago, Ramiro Orellana (wonderfully played by Patricio Contreras, Sexo con amor), who's sent to internal exile in a secluded part of Chile for... read review >> |
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"A refreshingly high-concept low-budget outing, the Duplass Brothers' Baghead is an immensely likeable and surprisingly well-executed genre hybrid," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "The difficulty one finds in trying to categorize it is part of its charm... [I]t smartly proves that it only takes the slightest, smartest tweaks to temporarily revitalize an entire genre." Sean Axmaker talks with Jay and Mark Duplass about how they've pulled this off... Read article >>
Also new: David D'Arcy talks with Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, about their documentary Full Battle Rattle (which is about soldiers training in a fictional town for the real Iraq War), currently at Film Forum in New York through Tuesday. |
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Summer Camp
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