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Time Magazine's Richard Corliss called 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (finally officially out on DVD today) "one of the strongest movies in recent years." GC editor David Hudson had Christian Mungiu's Cannes Prize-winner as the best film of '07. The NY Times' Manhola Dargis called it "a ferocious, unsentimental, often brilliantly directed film about a young woman who helps a friend secure an abortion...the camera doesn't follow the action, it expresses consciousness itself." See more on GC Daily from its Cannes premiere and a podcast from the NYFF. |
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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Edge of Heaven, Standard Operating Procedure and more.
- What We're Watching: War, Inc., Very British Gangster, When They Cry..
- Explore: Sergey Dvortsevoy/Tulpan.
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"With impeccable skill," wrote Wesley Morris. "[Fatih] Akin has made a film roiling with cruelty but guided by tough political optimism. No, we can't all get along, but some us of are trying." "An intriguing, complex, beautifully acted and directed piece of work, partly a realist drama of elaborate coincidences, near-misses and near-hits, further tangled with shifts in the timeline - and partly an almost dreamlike meditation with visual symmetries and narrative rhymes," wrote Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian. More, on GreenCine Guru, and on GreenCine Daily (and from Cannes). |
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"With Standard Operating Procedure, the Iraq War finally has its Hearts And Minds," wrote AV Club's Scott Tobias about Errol Morris' chilling doc about those infamous Abu Ghraib images. "Disturbing, analytical and morose," wrote Roger Ebert. "This is not a 'political' film nor yet another screed about the Bush administration or the war in Iraq. It is driven simply, powerfully, by the desire to understand those photographs." Read our interview with Morris, too. |
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Joshua Seftel, whose previous work included the hit and miss documentary Taking on the Kennedys, on that famous political clan, directs his first feature, and may be a little over his head here. This absurdist political farce has its moments but requires a deft touch for satire, and with Billy Wilder no longer available, perhaps no one could have made the uneven script (by Mark Leyner, Jeremy Pikser and its star John Cusack) work. It's ambitious, and while I don't know if some of the criticism it's received for being "already out of date" is quite fair... Read more >>
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Gay liberation takes on a whole new meaning with A Very British Gangster, the documentary by Donal MacIntyre that explores the infamous Noonan family of Manchester, England. Initially appearing like a rowdy bunch of over-age high-schoolers, the Noonan clan, friends and hangers-on slowly morph into something far more complex -- and troubling. And so, too, does the film itself... read review >> |
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The very first episode of When They Cry treats you to a violent, disturbing scene that, at first, is reminiscent of Paranoia Agent: A boy with a baseball bat goes a little crazy, kills some cute girls. Only in Japan, right? (The show was at one point suspended in Japan after a teenaged girl killed her father with an axe.) Immediately after that shocking scene, you're treated to the half-creepy, half-cute theme that pretty much sets the tone for the series perfectly. Then it rewinds to several days before the incident, full of a kind of "slice of life" feel. Makes you think you just imagined crazed baseball bat boy. The format this series follows is a little odd. You have five total arcs, though the last two tie in with the first two... read review >> |
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David D'Arcy talks with documentary filmmaker Sergey Dvortsevoy about his first narrative feature, Tulpan, the winner of the Prize of Un Certain Regard at Cannes this year. As comic as it is awe-inspiring, Tulpan is set in the vast emptiness of southern Kazakhstan’s Hunger Steppe. Read article >>
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