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In Gus Van Sant's Milk, which is opening this month, Josh Brolin plays Harvey Milk's fellow supervisor Dan White, who eventually pulled the trigger and ended Milk's life in 1978. (The real-life White received only a light sentence based on what came to be known as "the Twinkie defense." See the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk for more info.) Brolin's White comes across as a frustrated, underconfident fellow. He only appears in a handful of scenes with Milk, but their attempts to reach one another are almost touching. Jeffrey Anderson sat in on a roundtable discussion with the film's cast following the premiere, appropriately, at San Francisco's Castro Theater, and caught the typically boisterous, candid Brolin... Read article >> |
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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Wanted, My Father My Lord, and much more.
- What We're Watching: White Dog, The Trap and Whatever You Say.
- Service Highlights: 'tis the season for Gift Certificates!
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Check all logic and most of your brains at the door for this hyperkinetic actioner from the filmmaker behind Night Watch and Day Watch. Peter Travers wrote, "Brutal, sexy, built to thrill and minus a scintilla of redeeming social value, the movie -- based on a series of comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones -- explodes like summer fireworks." Or as Variety put it, "Like it or not, Wanted pretty much slams you to the back of your chair from the outset and scarcely lets up for the duration." |
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"An impressive first feature," wrote Kenneth Turan, "that stands out for its emotional qualities, its ambition and its brevity. In this day of endless epics, this 73-minute Israeli film manages to do a lot with very little time." Adds Slant's Ed Gonzalez: " My Father My Lord's gripping sense of empathy, parlayed through a Sokurovian fixation on faces and the love and fear transmitted between beaming sets of eyes, practically burns a hole through the screen." |
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One of the most famous unknown films of all time finally comes out of the shadows of bootleggery and gets the Criterion treatment. Samuel Fuller's White Dog, a story about the re-programming of a dog that's been trained to attack black people, was considered such volatile subject matter in 1982 that the NAACP threatened boycotts while the film was still shooting. Paramount Studios eventually cowed and shelved the film entirely which only served to generate a long-lasting ignominy against Fuller. Eventually the director was forced to relocate to France where at the very least, people actually watch movies before labeling a film-maker as a virulent racist. Even then he was only able to make one more film, the extraordinarily bitter Street of No Return, about... Read review >> |
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That age-old question "How can you live with yourself?" takes on new and urgent meaning in The Trap, which is now out on DVD courtesy of Film Movement. An award-winning Serbian/German/Hungarian co-production (in the Serbo-Croatian language), directed by Srdan Golubovic from a screenplay by a trio of writers, the film is beyond "dark." But the film is not just some "artsy" Eastern European concoction; among its several prizes is an Audience Award for Best Film at the Trieste Fest. Audience awards are mostly given to films that are easily accessible -- which The Trap most definitely is. But it is also an artful... Read review >> |
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When I interviewed actor/director Guillaume Canet shortly before the American theatrical release of his Tell No One (a movie that has gone on to become America's most successful foreign-language release of the past year; out on DVD next March), I asked him why we had never been able to see his earlier and first full-length film Mon Idole. Canet seemed surprised that his film was not available here, but Tell No One's enormous American success may have remedied that. Better late than never, for -- even in a mediocre DVD transfer and bearing the undistinguished "international" title of Whatever You Say -- it was worth the wait... Read review >> |
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'Tis the season to start thinking about holiday gift shopping and giving, and what could be an easier and more rewarding gift for the film geek in your circle of friends and family than a GreenCine Gift Certificate? It's truly the gift that keeps on giving! More >> |
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