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In celebration of Criterion's AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa box set, GreenCine Daily will be looking at four rare films only now available on DVD this week [and only available as part of that gigantic set]. We begin with Vadim Rizov's take on 1945's The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, a film that, stylistically and thematically, was a harbinger for many of AK's more famous films to come... More >> |
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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: The Cove, World's Greatest Dad and more.
- What We're Watching: Downhill Racer, Paper Heart, Dostana.
- Explore: Until the Light Takes Us.
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This Sundance Audience Award-winner is both a doc and an extremely tense eco-thriller exposing a shocking and unimaginable crime against nature. "What's so remarkable about Louie Psihoyos' documentary isn't just that it's a powerful work of agitprop that's going to have you sending furious e-mails to the Japanese Embassy on your way out of the theater, "wrote Andrew O'Hehir. "That's definitely true, but the effectiveness of The Cove also comes from its explosive cinematic craft, its surprising good humor and pure excitement." Adds David Edelstein: "The end is as rousing as anything from Hollywood. " |
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U nderseen nihilistic black comedy almost makes us forgive Robin Williams for Old Dogs; Williams, who "hasn't been this sympathetic in years" [EW], plays the father of an insufferable jackass who then... well, it goes nuttier from there. "With a merciless acuity this nihilistic comedy ridicules collective grief and the news media’s cynical marketing of inspirational uplift after a death," wrote Stephen Holden in NY Times. Read also Aaron Hillis' IFC i nterview with director Bobcat Goldthwait. |
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Even in an artform as ever-changing as cinema, the best films from what many consider one of Hollywood's strongest, richest periods -- the late 60s/early 70s -- still feel remarkably fresh. And it's not just the famous examples, from The Graduate to The Parallax View, Chinatown to The Godfather, it's some of the lesser but still important films from that period that make it such a deep and endlessly fascinating era to study. And in that group I'd add Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer, which is now out in a sparkling new Criterion DVD. Featuring some of the most innovative sports photography for its day and... Read review >> |
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From James Van Maanen: " How long can you play 'adorable' before it curdles? I suspect each viewer will have his own limit. For me, Charlyne Yi, whose adorable quotient is somewhere off the charts, hasn't come close to souring yet. From the first moments right through the finale of Paper Heart, the film that she stars in and has co-written (with director Nicholas Jasenovec), I just wanted to pull her to me, hug her ever so gently...Of course, she would run fleeing from this, as she probably would from most people's declarations. Which is part of her charm -- and believability. I am unfamiliar with her stand-up routine (we see a little of it in the film), but venture to guess that this persona she shows us – sweet and innocent yet not that naïve – is so finely honed by now..." Read review >> |
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This Bollywood comedy bears some resemblance in plot set up to I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (two straight men pretend to be a gay couple) but it's actually quite a bit more fun. Set in Miami, Dostana has a "a fresh sensibility" wrote Mark Olsen in the LA Times. "The film projects a fairly benign, effectively neutral attitude toward gay life, but homosexuality remains officially illegal in India, making it playfully rebellious if not exactly a grand social statement. Rather, the film mines the situation as a freewheeling comedy of manners with an appropriate touch of weepy melodrama and, this being Bollywood, songs, songs, songs in the darndest places." |
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GreenCine Daily podcast: Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell, co-directors of Until the Light Takes Us, a compelling new doc about Norwegian death metal, chat about how they embedded themselves in this volatile subculture, their theories on how showmanship spiraled into criminal activity, whether Aites' background as frontman of the band Iran made him hypersensitive to a story about musicians, and how they manage to get along as both a couple and artistic collaborators. Read more >>
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