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As we stepped into and then out of Halloween, we decided it was time to truly scare the heck out of you by posting Simon Augustine's unforgettable new list " The 25 Most Disturbing Movies." The first half appeared here and we've since been counting 'em down to number 1 (tomorrow; today we leave off with #3 and the even more disturbing #2). Some of these films are so disturbing we don't even have them, and/or they're not on DVD; some you may have heard of or seen; one of them is a figment of the author's demented imagination. Read on, if you dare... More >> |
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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Ballast, Woman in Berlin, Up, and more.
- What We're Watching: Spread [DVD of the week!], Lake Tahoe, Last Days of Disco.
- Explore: Wings of Desire podcast; Red Shoes restoration Q&A.
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Lance Hammer's first feature, set in the winter in the Mississippi Delta, won the Cinematography and Directing Awards at Sundance. " Ballast inexorably grows and deepens and gathers power and absorbs us, wrote Roger Ebert. "I always say I hardly ever cry at sad films, but I sometimes do, just a little, at films about good people." Wesley Morris called it "the most significant feature about poor black life since Charles Burnett's 1977 Killer of Sheep." |
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The LA Times called Max Faerberboeck's film "the best movie you're not going to see this year" but thankfully this is now no longer true. The German film, set in 1945 during the Red Army invasion of Berlin, is "a distinctive achievement," wrote Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, "a World War II movie unlike any other and one of the few films ever to address a topic that makes almost everyone want to look away: What happens to women in wartime." Adds A.O. Scott: "That the film manages to be understated, calm and intelligent in spite of its wrenching subject matter is perhaps its most impressive accomplishment." |
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DVD of the Week! Maybe it's a misnomer to hail an Ashton Kutcher indie vehicle the week's highest recommendation (the case certainly won't be made here that it's more or less worthwhile viewing than Up, Lake Tahoe or Ballast), but Scottish director David Mackenzie and writer Jason Dean Hall's clever, pruriently entertaining satire about a sociopathic hipster grifter deserves a better shot at exposure‹no pun intended‹after the damning reviews it's had since Sundance. It's a film that's easy to misread and dismiss as superficial pap simply because its characters are prone to repulsively opportunistic behavior... Read more >> |
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On the basis of his first two full-length features -- Duck Season and now Lake Tahoe -- I'm ready to declare Mexican filmmaker Fernando Eimbcke (pronounced I'm-Kay, with the accent on the first syllable) a real original. Eimbcke's got his own tone and “take” on things, and his movies remind me of little else in the canon. Sure, you could bring up Jarmusch (as some have), but Eimbcke's work is sweeter, looser, with a distinctive sense of hopeful surprise in the world and its people -- Mexican variety. As co-writer (with Paola Markovitch) and director, Eimbcke offers... read review >> |
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It is, a title archly informs us, “the very early '80s” - “September,” to be exact - but the strobelight flicker of the opening credits and the thumping beat make it clear that we are in The Last Days of Disco (1998). In the final film of director Whit Stillman's informal trilogy, recent Hampshire grads Charlotte ( Kate Beckinsale) and Alice ( Chloe Sevigny, escaping from Harmony Korine films) spend their days trying to discover the best seller that will elevate them from editorial assistants to associate editors at a midtown Manhattan publishing house... Read more >> |
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New podcast: In celebration of Criterion's new, deluxe 2-DVD Wings of Desire, Aaron Hillis and Andrew Grant sat down to watch the film and discuss its elusive magic and why a work so specific to East-West German tensions has aged so gracefully. More >>
Buzzed about at this year's Cannes as one of the most miraculous film restorations to date is the UCLA Film & Television Archive's work on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes. Aaron attended a special screening, where he caught up with Martin Scorsese, editor and Powell's widow Thelma Schoonmaker, and filmmaker James Toback about the film. More >> |
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