The Recycled Film

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The shaky-camera mockumentary genre, which most people trace back to The Blair Witch Project, just keeps growing every year. To be honest though, I had no idea District 9 was that kind of movie going in—or that it was going to be as amaxing as it is. Sitting in the fourth row of a press [...]

Created from a novel by the writer Sapphire, “Push” is, as the guy I heard on the bus said, “incredibly disturbing, yet outstanding and uplifting.”

Film noir is a term widely thrown around these days, yet rarely appropriate. For example, Sin Nombre, another popular Sundance film this year, is even termed in the official guide as a noir—this is untrue all except for possibly the film’s ending. However, one of the lone films from Ireland this year, Oliver Hirschbiegel and [...]

Shortly before appearing at Sundance, Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre (directly translated: “without name”) was picked up by Focus Features. This rapidly growing NBC division, otherwise known as “the studio that brought you The Motorcycle Diaries”, was probably fairly pleased to hear last Saturday that their recent acquisition had won the U.S. Best Director Award: Dramatic, [...]

There are films made in England and then there are English films. Rather than actors and directors born in the UK, the significance of the latter relies upon the some presence of well-established hallmarks of English narrative structure, cinematography, and dialogue format. It is under this thesis that we find the spirit of British cinema [...]

In a brief introduction to his latest film, director Nicolas Winding Refn characterized his latest film as a “visceral assault on the senses.” Indeed, it would be difficult for a just portrayal of “Britain’s most dangerous prisoner” to not be sharply aggressive—visually, emotionally, and thematically. Yet, the evolutionary tale of Michael Peterson into his alter-ego, [...]

The Eccles Theatre in Park City offers a seating capacity of 1,270, including the balcony. At the Monday afternoon world premiere of John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, not one of these seats was left empty. While there is no denying the fact that most showed up just to glimpse NBC’s Office dreamboat, a [...]

You don’t have to be from San Francisco to understand the conventions of a hard knock life in the slums. Yet, the Bratt brothers—director Peter and lead actor Benjamin (formerly of Law & Order)—seem to be intimately familiar with them, given the nature of their latest film, La Mission. You also don’t need to be [...]

Former Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth began a trend of marketing documentaries as horror movies. Yet, the “terrifying because it’s real” routine just doesn’t seem to cut it when reviewing Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country. Those who remember the 2007 anti-government protests in Burma and the “March of the Monks” have [...]