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Ken Bowser's new doc, Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune, which is slowly releasing nationally, was called “at once an unsentimental portrait of the ambitious singer who thought himself bound for glory, and an affecting elegy for a time when song was a form of revolution" (Lisa Schwarzbaum). In an exclusive new interview, Bowser chatted with Kathy Harr about art and truth, yesterday's failures and today's wars, and what was left on the cutting-room floor. Read more >> |
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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Black Swan, Father of My Children and much more.
- What We're Watching: Topsy Turvy, Persian Cats, GasLand.
- Explore: Sucker Punch; New Directors/New Films.
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Natalie Portman gave her all and won an Oscar as the emotionally scarred, possibly paranoid ballerina in Darren Aronofsky's homage to Italian horror by way of All About Eve. "Visceral and real even while it's one delirious, phantasmagoric freakout," writes Manhola Dargis. It is, adds David Edelstein, "a tour de force, a work that fully lives up to its director's ambitions." "Florid, often lurid, completely enthralling film held in place by a disarming Portman, who rarely leaves the frame." ( Keith Phipps.) Read more on GC Daily. |
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"What French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve has created is an extraordinarily empathetic humanistic drama, a film of love, joy, sadness and hope that understands how complex our emotions are and does beautiful justice to them" (Kenneth Turan, LA Times.) Adds Glenn Heath, the film "beautifully illuminates the quiet transitional moments defining the grieving process, finding redemptive sublimity in tragedy, and illuminating all the layers in between." |
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Mike Leigh's rapturous Topsy-Turvy, now on a lovely new DVD from Criterion (supervised by cinematographer Dick Pope), isn't so much an argument against auteurism, but a concurrence for the beauty of collaboration. Over the course of the sweeping multi-character narrative, Leigh mixes performance, practice, and discourse with effortless precision, showing the "symptoms of fatigue" concerning the artistic process, but also the power of sudden inspiration. W.S. Gilbert ( Jim Broadbent), Sir Arthur Sullivan ( Allan Corduner), the troupe of actors led by Richard Temple ( Timothy Spall), the costume designers, set decorators, choreographers, producers, and couriers all make a substantial impact on the gloriously textural... Read more >>
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In the spring of 2010 Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi received a quick, two-day retrospective, via the Film Society of Lincoln Center, of his five previous films in preparation for the theatrical opening of his latest, No One Knows About Persian Cats. While it’s taken nearly a full year to get that film onto DVD, the wait proves worth it. It's an odd thing, initially, to see Ghobadi working in the big city because all his other films ( A Time for Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq, Turtles Can Fly and Half Moon) have taken place in, around or between remote villages. And his urban Iran seems nothing like that we've seen from Majid Majidi in The Song of Sparrows... Read more >> |
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An Oscar-nominee for best feature documentary, " GasLand may become to the dangers of natural gas drilling what Silent Spring was to DDT" (Robert Koehler, Variety). It is "the paragon of first person activist filmmaking done right," writes Erick Kohn. From Village Voice: "With its jolting images of flammable tap water and chemically burned pets, New York theater-director-turned-documentarian Josh Fox's Sundance-feted shocker makes an irrefutable case against U.S. corporate 'fracking.'" |
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On GreenCine Daily: "At once completely idiotic and, like, totally awesome, the gamer-geek blockbuster Sucker Punch splits the difference between Kick-Ass and dumbass," writes Steve Dollar, "as it conjures a CGI-enriched fantasy realm where unfolds a Gothic fairy tale about dirty pretty things evening the score in a man's, man's, man's, man's world." Read more >>
Also: Vadim Rizov's critic's notebook looks at several of the more interesting films, including At Ellen's Age (Im Alter Von Ellen) and Attenberg, screening at the "New Directors/New Films" series in NYC (runs through April 3). Read more >>
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