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Aaron Hillis kicks off the new year at GreenCine Daily with several provocative new posts, includung a wrap-up of our own Best of 2008 lists (see more at right). See if you can identify the two films pictured above. Aaron also introduces his new Film of the Week and DVD of the Week columns, and offers up an entertaining and illuminating podcast with some fellow film critics. GreenCine Daily >> |
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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Wackness, Grocer's Son and more.
- What We're Watching: Baghead, Borzage and Ping Pong Playa.
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The most enjoyable and
memorable aspect of Jonathan Levine's coming of age film, set in early
90s New York, is arguably Ben Kingsley's surprising turn as a
dopesmoking therapist. But the film is also a "funny and touching mood
piece," wrote Michael Sragow. "Levine's hero [ Josh Peck] is the kind
of guy who likes to savor his experiences in his mind. His
gritty-lyric sensibility is what makes The Wackness memorable." In
short, it's much more dope than wack. See more from GC's Craig Phillips. |
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From Film Movement comes this "small gem of a film," wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "A surprise hit in France [the film] is the second feature directed by Éric Guirado, who prepared for it by filming portraits of traveling tradesmen in southern and central France. [It's] a triumphant accumulation of such quirky, perfectly observed details." Adds Steven Winn: " The Grocer's Son doesn't pretend that change comes easily or completely, or that things are likely to turn out as anyone expects. But it does say that change is possible." |
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Alan Ball has an axe to grind, possibly several axes to grind. After many years toiling as a sitcom writer for shows like Cybil and Grace Under Fire, he won an Academy award for writing the suburban exegesis American Beauty, created the HBO series Six Feet Under, an at times cruelly bleak dramedy about a family-run funeral home, and has now developed True Blood, a Southern Gothic melodrama television series wherein vampires and humans reside in strained coexistence. So it makes a certain kind of sense that Towelhead, his feature film debut as a director, would contain elements of.... Read review >>
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If you think the catch-phrase "So many movies, so little time" has meaning when you're young, I can only advise you: Just wait. With this in mind, I decided to tackle only four of the thirteen films in the new Murnau, Borzage and Fox Box Set from Fox--which offers several from each director plus a documentary about the two men and their history with the Fox studio. Oddly enough, the least of the four is probably the best-known property in the series: Liliom (1930) -- from the Ferenc Molnár stage play, which has been filmed a half dozen times (two of these for TV and once as Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Carousel). Liliom is the title character, a carnival... Read review >> [last chance to enter contest] |
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