If A Late Quartet, the second feature by Yaron Zilberman and his first film since his 2004 documentary Watermarks, proves anything, it’s that good performances can elevate average movies. To say that Zilberman’s cast saves his picture would be somewhat generous, though. They only distract us from its inadequacies, which are numerous, though perhaps this is a harsher judgment than the film really deserves. A Late Quartet is harmless, airy fluff, small-scale prestige cinema that smartly gathers together a group of very gifted actors in the service of exploring life lessons filtered through the overarching motif of Beethoven’s Opus 131 String Quartet (in C-sharp minor); it’s also painfully undercooked to…
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G-S-T Review…The Sessions
Life deals many of us some pretty crappy hands. The trick to dealing with much of it, as they say, is to have a good attitude. In the case of journalist Mark O’Brien, life handed him a spectacularly bum hand in the form of childhood polio. But you wouldn’t know it to talk to him as his positive outlook far outweighs both the iron lung he sleeps in and the paralyzing affect the disease had on him physically. After an 18 year absence from feature films director Ben Lewin takes the helm for The Sessions; a tender story that retells the time in O’Brien’s life when he researched/wrote one of his most provocative stories. The film doesn’t dance around sensitive…
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G-S-T Review…Cloud Atlas
Following Cloud Atlas, viewers will invariably find themselves armed with a variety of useful adjectives to describe the film in a single word: grand, towering, epic, inspiring, heartbreaking, heartwarming, hodgepodge. But in adapting David Mitchell’s 2004 novel of the same name, siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer have created a singular, unique work that majestically shrugs off attempts at quick, careless classification. Cloud Atlas is a cinematic medley of narratives connected together through time and space, driven by a sense of enterprise and purpose, and defined by its advocacy of basic, simple morality and human compassion; fitting the film into traditional categories would not be unlike forcing a square…
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G-S-T Review…Pusher
After seeing Pusher, the British remake of G-S-T favorite Nicholas Winding Refn’s 1996 debut feature of the same name, I’m still struggling with questions about the cinematic space it ultimately occupies. None of them, mind you, are germane to discussions of the film’s quality which is respectable, so in the end I’m probably just navel gazing. But the concept of remaking a movie remains contentious even though filmmakers have been remaking movies for decades, so Pusher will inevitably be subjected to value tests based on its recycled nature, which leads me to the good news: Luis Prieto has made a strong, vibrant crime film. The bad news, though, is that…
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[Fantastic Fest Review]…Tai Chi Zero
Editor’s Note: To coincide with its limited release staring on October 19th, we’re republishing our Fantastic Fest review of Tai Chi Zero. Have you ever found yourself wondering “what would a film look like if you threw Street Fighter II Turbo, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, Shaolin Soccer and Red Cliff in a blender?” Well if so then you’re in luck because Stephen Fung has just that hybrid combination to offer us at the 2012 Fantastic Fest. A highly stylized period piece it shows its fondness for manga and video games that at times overshadows the story since the gimmick gets old. Still it’s really fun at times and the pick me…
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G-S-T Review…Argo
Mark Twain once opined that truth is stranger than fiction, and if we accept his sentiment then Argo could be considered one of the most bizarre slices of reality ever portrayed on film. Did you ever hear the one about how the CIA enlisted the likes of John Chambers and Jack Kirby to whisk stranded Americans out of hostile territory at the height of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis? On paper, Argo‘s plot reads like something cooked up by the Coen brothers and Armando Iannuci, an episodic farce about the irreverent ludicrousness of government and the ignorant cruelty of humanity on an international stage; of course, the helmsman here is none…
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G-S-T Review…Taken 2
Going into a Luc Besson film (whether he produced it, directed it, or in this case penned it) you’ll likely find two distinct elements: kick ass action and memorable/likable characters. It’s easily evidenced looking back at his earlier works like The Fifth Element, Leon, Wasabi, The Transporter and Taken. But after a surprise hit actioner like Pierre Morel’s Taken, to try and top that, even with Besson on board, Olivier Megaton has a tough act to follow. Yet all the hope in the world couldn’t make this anticipated follow up/supposedly white hot revenge thriller more than a hollow luke warm sequel. It’s like Bryan Mills or rather Liam Neeson is there in spirit but the flesh is weak…and so’s…
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G-S-T Review…Butter
You can’t go anywhere today without being inundated with technology. Children today have greater technological advancements at their fingertips than NASA had when it launched its first rocket. Every facet of our lives has been influenced by technology and movies are no exception. Movies now benefit from realistic CG and incredible graphics. The time it takes for a movie to go from script to screen is now measured in a matter of weeks rather than months. All that being said, it’s nice to take a step back occasionally and watch a film that does not rely heavily upon computer-generated material. Butter is just such a film. In a small town…
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G-S-T Review…Solomon Kane
I don’t know if I’m doing Solomon Kane any favors by discussing its common ancestry; connecting the film to a gene pool that contains Van Helsing and Season of the Witch brands it with a very specific set of very low expectations. In fact, I may be damning Solomon Kane with faint praise when I say that it happens to be several cuts above both of those disasters. Thus, I have to rely on my readers’ trust in me as a critic when I say that Michael J. Bassett’s cinematic rendition of Robert E. Howard’s Puritanical anti-hero really is an earnest and pretty damn entertaining vision of Gothic pulp heroics. It…
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G-S-T Review…Looper
At a glance, Looper almost feels like an outlier in Rian Johnson’s minute body of work. Unlike Johnson’s flawless debut, Brick, or his disappointing sophomore effort, The Brothers Bloom, Looper operates within a grand, wide-spanning scope that reaches across time; the central story here is intimate, just as in his other films, but it’s set against a backdrop of classical science fiction world-building and the machinations of time travel. We’re not in high school, Montenegro, or Prague anymore, but rather a dystopic vision of the future which we experience at two very different points in history, both populated with hover bikes, mafia button men, rampant poverty, and telekinetic mutations. Robbed…
