All articles by Patrick Z McGavin – Page 2
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Reviews
Grandmother's Flower
Dir: Mun Jeong-hyun. South Korea. 2007. 90mins.The political is transformed into the intensely personal in South Korean documentary Grandmother's Flower, a powerful first-person family essay by Mun Jeong-hyun. Mun's technique is sometimes shoddy and his aesthetic decisions questionable, but the content proves so absorbing and miraculous that it overrides the ...
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Reviews
Motherland (La Terramadre)
Dir: Nello La Marca. Italy. 2008. 120mins.Italian director Nello La Marca's first narrative feature Motherland (La terramadre) is a neorealist drama about economic disenfranchisement that explores the intertwined fates of two radically different people trying to survive in the dirt-poor southern Sicilian city of Palma di Montechiaro .La Marca has ...
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Reviews
Everything is Fine (Tout est parfait)
Dir: Yves Christian Fournier. Canada. 2008. 118mins.Quebec director Yves Christian Fournier's first feature, Everything is Fine, is a sombre, frequently moving portrait limning the emotional and social aftermath of a tragedy. Fournier's reach sometimes exceeds his grasp, but his complicated and nuanced study of sorrow and loss is sharpened by ...
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Reviews
Jerusalema
Dir/scr: Ralph Ziman. South Africa. 2008. 118mins.The third feature of Ralph Ziman, the new South African action movie Jerusalema is reportedly drawn from actual events. More accurately it is inspired from the watching of a lot of movies, combining and cannily poaching parts of the original Scarface, Superfly, GoodFellas, New ...
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Features
Awards Countdown - People - Awards People
UK director Paul Greengrass is renowned for his dynamic and visceral style that puts the audience in the centre of the action. Editor Christopher Rouse, who worked with Greengrass on United 93 and also cut The Bourne Supremacy, shares the director's aesthetic sensibilities."We are both relentless in exploring the potential ...
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Reviews
Just Anybody (Le Premier Venu)
Dir/Scr: Jacques Doillon. Fr/Belg 2008. 122mins.French director Jacques Doillon's first feature in five years, Just Anybody (Le Premier Venu), is a supple and intelligent work that exerts a strange and fascinating pull. The movie consistently darts and moves toward the unexpected and unveils depths of characterisation and subtlety of action ...
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Reviews
The Guitar
Dir: Amy Redford. US. 2008. 93mins.The suggestive metaphor of loss and emotional trauma as divine liberation is treated awkwardly between the outrageous and obscene in Amy Redford's debut feature The Guitar. Saffron Burrows is commanding as a distraught woman who finds a novel way to cope with tragedy, but the ...
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Reviews
Phoebe in Wonderland
Dir/scr: Daniel Barnz. US. 2008. 96mins.In the lyrically compelling though dynamically flawed Phoebe in Wonderland, first-time feature director Daniel Barnz excites and frustrates in equal measure. His story of a dazzlingly smart young girl's personal liberation through her exposure to the Lewis Carroll masterpiece has moments of awe and ...
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Reviews
Blind Date
Dir: Stanley Tucci. US/Belgium/Holland. 2008. 85mins.The second of a planned trilogy of English-language remakes of films by the murdered Dutch provocateur Theo van Gogh, Stanley Tucci's Blind Date, about a man and woman who stage elaborate games in order to conceal the pain of a horrifying loss, is a ...
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Reviews
The Merry Gentleman
Dir: Michael Keaton. US. 2008. 110mins.In his directorial debut The Merry Gentleman, Michael Keaton reveals some of the same flair for the off-beat, moody and unconventional he has acutely demonstrated as an actor. He summons a wonderful performance by Kelly Macdonald and strong character distinction to the secondary players, ...
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Reviews
Assassination of a High School President
Dir: Brett Simon. US. 2008. 98mins.Brett Simon's Assassination of a High School President is a small and pleasant surprise. It's a mostly energetic satire of the sexual, social and political hierarchies of contemporary high school reconceived, like Rian Johnson's Brick, as a postmodern noir. Its throwaway accessibility makes it go ...
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Reviews
The Brøken
Dir/scr: Sean Ellis. UK/France. 2008. 88mins.In his second feature The Brøken the talented British director Sean Ellis (Cashback) traffics in a melange of styles and historical references that range from the poetic horror works of Jean Cocteau (Orpheus) to the social malaise and extreme alienation of Roman Polanski (The Tennant), ...
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Reviews
The Deal
Dir: Steven Schachter. Canada. 2008. 98mins.Completing an informal trilogy of Sundance titles about the making of movies (following Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind and Barry Levinson's What Just Happened'), Steven Schachter's The Deal is erratic and paper thin. Not a moment of it rings particularly true, and it never gathers ...
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Reviews
The Escapist
Dir: Rupert Wyatt. UK/Ireland. 2008. 105mins.In his debut feature The Escapist director Rupert Wyatt animates the virtues of the B-movie thriller - direct expression, taut construction and a stripped down psychology-with a more conceptually unorthodox narrative design that collapses time and space.In the script he wrote with Daniel Hardy, Wyatt ...
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Reviews
Sugar
Dir/scr: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. US. 2008. 117minsIn a word, Sugar is extraordinary. The second feature of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden deepens the promise and talent they exhibited on their debut Half Nelson. A singular examination of sports, class and the American social fabric refracted through the perspective ...
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Reviews
Choke
Dir: Clark Gregg. US. 2008. 89minsActor Clark Gregg's ambitious adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's 2001 cult novel Choke is stylistically rambunctious and tonally inconsistent. If the center never quite holds and it never quite reaches complete success artistically, the movie certainly commands interest through the superb lead performance of Sam Rockwell ...
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Reviews
Be Kind Rewind
Michel Gondry. US.2007. 101minsJean-Luc Godard's famous observation that the best film criticism is to remake the same film is given a deliciously inventive and stylistically daring treatment in virtuoso French director Michel Gondry's fourth feature Be Kind Rewind. It's a jaunty, outrageous and visually inventive fantasia that is wondrous, beguiling ...
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Reviews
The Yellow Handkerchief
Dir. Udayan Prasad. US. 2008. 103mins. The American debut of Udayan Prasad (My Son the Fanatic), The Yellow Handkerchief is a visually confident, emotionally bruising road movie about a trinity of lost souls haunted by their past and break free of their restricted lives. The writing never quite matches the ...
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News
United States - Sayles talk
In John Sayles' new film Honeydripper, Danny Glover stars as a huckster artist, a barnstorming pianist who conceives a wild and daring plan to revive the economic fortunes of his struggling juke joint in 1950 Alabama by importing a young guitar virtuoso to headline there.It is not a stretch to ...