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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Kick-Ass, A Prophet, and more.
- What We're Watching: Service, Secret of the Grain, Sweetgrass.
- Contests: A Prophet and Kids Are All Right.
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Jacques Audiard's startlingly good film, a nominee for the past year's Oscar for Foreign Language Film, is "One of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices," writes Manhola Dargis. It's a "new crime classic" (Peter Travers) and "If Malik doesn't remind you of Al Pacino's Michael Corleone on his journey from innocence to corruption in The Godfather saga," remarks Steven Rea, "well, he should. A Prophet is similarly, startlingly momentous." |
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Perhaps misunderstood and mismarketed, Matthew Vaughn's kick-ass Kick Ass "moves with such bloody assurance that you'd be forgiven for not seeing how smart it is," writes Richard Corliss. "But smart it is. Smart, important and deadly." Adds Joe Leydon: "Equal parts audacious dark comedy, wish-fulfillment fantasy and over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek action-adventure."And Vadim Rizov: "There are more cheap thrills, gory explosions and superheroes than a movie geek's YouTube mash-up." A fine cast, with Chloe Moretz particularly memorable. |
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Since its divisive reception at the Cannes and New York film festivals, the cavernous, dilapidated movie theater where most of Brillante Mendoza's perturbingly kicky, neo-realist melodramedy Serbis (Service) takes place has drawn quick parallels to the likewise run-down theater of Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn -- which is to say, the similarities nearly end there. Both have queer cruising going on in the dark and blatantly symbolic qualities, but where Tsai's mythological theater itself is a nostalgic ode to filmmaking and filmgoing, the Angeles City X-rated movie house owned by the Pineda family in Serbis is the bigger-than-life stage for a familial microcosm of the poverty-stricken society outside. Perhaps Mendoza's film is better contextualized as the overlap between Tsai's and another NYFF 2008 film, the criminally undistributed Tony Manero... Read more >> |
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Abdel Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain turned up in America late in 2008 and, thought it was sparsely released, made a few critics' top ten lists. But in France, it was a major critical success and placed on Cahiers du Cinema's list of the ten best films of the decade. (On Film Comment's list of the best of the decade, it came it at #125.) This could be due to a cultural level that French people could see in the film that Americans could not appreciate; it takes place in the world of Arabs living in France and speaking mostly French. But besides relating to the immigrant experience, Americans can definitely appreciate that it's one of the best food movies of the decade. Kechiche, who appeared in the American film Sorry, Haters (2005), directs with long, loving takes, creating organic conversations and conflicts... Read more >>
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Sheep, bless 'em, are all over the place in Sweetgrass, the new documentary by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, which is all about herding, driving, birthing, shearing, protecting, feeding and otherwise caring for the woolly beasts. Hard to imagine that sheep could be so fascinating and charming to watch and listen to -- for awhile. Fortunately, there are other points of interest in this somewhat... Read more >> |
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Win a copy of the Academy Award nominated A Prophet on DVD, thanks to a new giveaway sponsored by GreenCine and Sony Pictures Classics. More >>
And don't forget about our ongoing contest with Focus Features in conjunction with The Kids Are All Right (seen at right). Win a $50 American Express Gift Card and more if you're a lucky winner, so enter now. More >> |
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