He may have spent his career wildly hopping genres, from historical melodrama (Raise the Red Lantern) to wuxia epic (Hero) to gangster flick (Shanghai Triad) to Coen brothers remake (A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop) to however you...
Despite the ups and downs of success and critical reception throughout his career, there remains something stubbornly auteuristic about Rodrigo Garcia. It’s not just that he returns again and again to female-centric, upper middle class domestic melodramas, though that’s certainly...
In the first shots of Grímur Hákonarson’s The County, Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir’s Inga enters a barn to find a cow early in the act of giving birth, with a pair of small hooves protruding from her body. Inga wraps a...
There’s an ironic employment of what ought to be HGTV fantasy material in the scene in Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s Things Heard & Seen when when a young couple–Amanda Seyfried’s Catherine and James Norton’s George–first arrive at their...
The vampire myth predates Bram Stoker’s legendary story. The mythology of reanimated, blood-drinking corpses is not only millenia-old, but also cross-cultural, possessing roots throughout the world. In weaving the tale found in his Dracula novel, Irishman Stoker combined some of...
Americans are so besotted with the notion of our military righteousness that we’ve sat through innumerable terrible, ostensibly patriotic films for decades, stretching back in a long tradition almost as august as the military itself. We’ll endure the worst dialogue,...
Of the many, many parts of Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat that are awkward and clumsy, perhaps the worst are those times when the movie tries too hard to make sense. We start with a tragic prologue set 400 years in...
We tend to develop relationships to sitcom characters that are slightly different than the ones we forge with other fictional people, probably because their main purpose is to make us smile. So it can be especially difficult to adjust to...
Nearly six and a half minutes have passed in George Gallo’s Vanquish before the movie has actually begun in earnest. The ludicrously protracted opening title sequence seems like a blatant stab at dragging the film’s running time over the 90...
Each of the young men and women on board the massive spaceship in Neil Burger’s Voyagers (not counting chaperone/father figure Richard, played by Colin Farrell) has been trained for their crucial mission since birth. Their top flight education is self-evident;...
