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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Gomorrah, Three Monkeys and more.
- What We're Watching: The Exiles, Funny People, Paraiso Travel.
- Explore: The documentary Defamation; Michael Shannon podcast.
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Matteo Garrone's staggering film based on Italian muckraker Roberto Saviano's 2006 "nonfiction novel" about the Camorra, Italy's largest organized crime syndicate, "comes on like Mean Streets cubed," wrote J Hoberman. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane mused, "The result demands a patient viewing, and maybe more than one; only after a second dose did I get the measure of Garrone's mastery, and realize how far he has surpassed, not merely honored, the author's courageous toil." We also highly recommend Chuck Stephens' new essay on the film on the Auteurs. |
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Of this most interesting Turkish film, Roger Ebert wrote: "The film has extraordinary beauty." It earned Nuri Bilge Ceylan (the beautiful Distant) an award for directing at Cannes last year. Adds Sean Axmaker, Ceylan " has an unerring gift for camera placement, and his slow, measured scenes can be as hypnotic as they are lovely -- at times, too much so, with the characters constrained by his poetic perfection. At others, they are all too human, confused and selfish and irrational. In these moments, Ceylan finds the film's heartbeat and its soul." |
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Most people have probably never heard of Kent MacKenzie's historically and culturally essential film The Exiles (1961). Some clips of it surfaced in Thom Andersen's exceptional 2004 cine-essay Los Angeles Plays Itself‹about the The City of Angels as depicted in movies‹but unfortunately, most people have never heard of that film either. Andersen included it prominently because it managed to find vivid corners of the city that didn't actually look like set dressing. Now, thanks to Milestone Films (who also gave us the 2007 re-release and 2008 DVD of Charles Burnett's... Read review >> |
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Judd Apatow's third film (after 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up) Funny People, is slow, disjointed, and riddled with long breaks between laughs. It is also something close to an American comedy masterpiece. Which doesn't mean that it is among the funniest American films. While Funny People is decidedly a film about people, the "funny" in the title is less apparent. But it calls into question our preconceived definitions of comedy: What makes someone a comedian? What makes the rest of us laugh... Read review >>
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A kind of Sin Nombre-lite -- very light, but still enjoyable -- Paraiso Travel tracks a group of Colombian immigrants before, during and after their landing in the USA, and finally into my own little New York neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens. Beginning with a set of knock-out opening credits, as the camera glides over the tiny rooms in a kind of halfway house for illegals, the filmmakers observe from on high the various goings-on with a clear-eyed, non-judgmental look. (The closing credits are equally good, and even more artistic)... Read review >> |
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Anti-semitism lurks in unsuspecting places, but only to those who seek it out. Defamation, Yoav Shamir's provocative documentary, released in select theaters last week, conveys at least that much. But Shamir goes one step further, arguing that awareness of the eponymous offense is buried in a confusion of past and present. Eric Kohn has more on GreenCine Daily.
If you know actor Michael Shannon by name, chances are it's because of his searing, Oscar-nominated performance as head-case John Givings in last year's Revolutionary Road. Yet the Kentucky-born Brooklynite has brought his towering presence and curious intensity to dozens of projects, most notably Bug, World Trade Center, Shotgun Stories, and now The Missing Person. Aaron Hillis chatted with Shannon for a new podcast.
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