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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Flight of the Red Balloon, Go Getters and more.
- What We're Watching: Beaufort, Hammer Horror, Ludwig.
- Explore: Vampire primer, revisited.
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A highlight at Cannes, Toronto, and New York film festivals, Flight of the Red Balloon is the latest masterpiece from Hou Hsiao Hsien. Inspired by Albert Lamorisse's 1956 Academy Award-winning classic, The Red Balloon, Hou expands on that film's key elements--a young boy, a red balloon, and Paris--to weave an achingly beautiful tale about the mysteries of familial bonds and the lingering effects the past has on us all. "In a class by itself," wrote J Hoberman. "In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs...this is a movie of genius." Adds the Chicago Tribune: "A gem." More >> |
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"Director-writer Martin Hynes shapes his first movie into something emotionally truthful, painfully funny and vibrantly alive," wrote Rolling Stone's Peter Travers of this underseen hipster indie featuring Zooey Deschanel and Thumbsucker's Lou Taylor Pucci. "It’s a near-perfect road movie, since you don’t want the ride to end. " Adds the Voice's Aaron Hillis: "rewards with gorgeous sun-spotted cinematography, tender digressions in rather brave quantities, and believably charming dialogue that doesn't all sound like it came from the same brain (listen up, Diablo Cody)." |
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Set in 2000 near the Lebanese border, Beaufort tells the story of a band of Israeli soldiers stationed in an old fortress at the end of 18 years' worth of occupation. The Israeli army prepares to withdraw the troops and shut down the fort, but the process takes forever. Meanwhile, the troops suffer needless attacks, numbing boredom and helpless frustration. A bomb expert, played by Ohad Knoller -- a familiar face from Eytan Fox's films Yossi & Jagger and The Bubble, as well as Brian De Palma's Redacted -- arrives to help clear a deadly device from the road, and the troops' commanding officer ( Oshri Cohen) questions his own effectiveness in battle. Cedar, who... Read more >> |
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Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has released a more-or-less random two-disc DVD collection of four movies from the Hammer vaults (and distributed in America by Columbia Pictures). Another thing the collection shows is that director Terence Fisher, probably the best of the Hammer contract players, was not infallible. His first contribution to this collection is arguably the least interesting, The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960). For Hammer, this was the first of two attempts at adapting the Robert Louis Stevenson story... read review >> |
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Appreciating Luchino Visconti's Ludwig, just released by Koch-Lorber in its original four-hour version, will depend somewhat on one's understanding of the place of royalty -- particularly the King -- in the minds and hearts of the people being ruled. Americans may intellectually understand the concept of royalty and divine right, but no direct connection to it. Italian director Visconti, himself an aristocrat, understood royalty's positives and negatives rather well, as demonstrated most by his film version of The Leopard, as well as by Senso and Ludwig... read review >> |
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Halloween is a fine time to revisit our horror primers. Why not creep yourself out this week with a visit to Count Dracula's castle, and other bloodsucking freaks, in Jeffrey Anderson's Vampire Primer.
Read primer >>
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Boo!
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