Sex, Lies, and Videotape
★★★½ 3.5/4 There’s something elegant about Soderbergh’s debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape, which earned him the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival. Soderbergh, the youngest director to [...]
March 2015
Noah Baumbach and the Comedy Sophisticates
Noah Baumbach is the third genius of the comedy sophisticates — the other two, Woody Allen and Whit Stillman. These three filmmakers are the prime users of the dialogue intelligentsia, where [...]
The Exterminating Angel
★★★★ 4/4 An artist is not one who creates meaning; an artist is one who creates possible meaning — such is Spanish director Luis Bunuel. Whether or not Bunuel knows what his 1962 [...]
L’Atalante
★★★ 3/4 Seinfeld isn’t funny and L’Atalante isn’t a masterpiece. Jean Vigo’s final film — and the one that basically killed him — follows a newlywed couple as they live [...]
Simon of the Desert
★★★ 3/4 Simeon Stylites was a real man who lived atop a pillar for 37 years in Syria. One day, when some local monastic Elders heard of his form of asceticism, they tried to test his [...]
Force Majeure
★★★★ 4/4 Werner Herzog’s short documentary piece, La Soufrière, Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster, follows Herzog as he journeys into an island, which is soon to be extinct from an [...]
Buzzard
★★★½ 3.5/4 Independent film Buzzard, by writer/director Joel Potrykus, includes a 5-minute take of a man eating spaghetti. It’s a static shot of actor Joshua Burge stuffing his face with [...]
The Man Who Knew Too Much
★★★ 3/4 I’m starting to think Hitchcock doesn’t have a fascination with the average middle-aged American, but rather, the box office does. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock’s remake of [...]
Film The Madman 