“I’ve liked every script I’ve ever written,” Bill Gunn told an interviewer in 1971, “I’ve hated every movie made from them.” It’s a prickly statement for a screenwriter, especially one with such a precarious reputation: fresh off two box-office failures, Gunn had already scandalized Warner Brothers with the wildly pan-sexual “Stop,” which the studio funded [...]
The first images of Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon,” a film shot in a delicately lambent palette suggestive of old gelatin silver prints, is of a shrub-ringed meadow, a horse and rider approaching steadily from the horizon. Set in the peaceful period just before Germany’s entry into World War I, it seems poised to offer [...]
Hollywood’s past is littered with dead genres. The road musical. The screwball comedy. The giant insect attack picture. It’s inevitable that certain styles will outlive their usefulness and grow stale; they end up in the scrap yard of ideas, waiting to be salvaged for parts. Even something as hopelessly camp as blaxpoitation, forever associated with [...]
Willfully clunky at a difficult 4 ½ hours, Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” has been met with a mixed reception since its late 2008 release, not only for its length but also for its supposed inability to confront its subject on truthful terms. While the latter may be true, it shouldn’t be counted as a criticism. Played [...]
In the last two years, Peter Greenaway has made two films about Rembrandt. More accurately, he’s made two versions of the same film about Rembrandt – a tableau-vivant period piece (“Nightwatching”) and an academic video essay (“Rembrandt’s J’Accuse”) – both of which come stocked with all the director’s signature tics. They also intensely plumb the [...]
Thick with intrigue and corruption, Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet” is well-stocked with the hallmarks of political cinema: miserable living conditions, exploited minorities, a grittily-tinged color palette. Viewed through this lens it plays as starkly effective polemic: a thriller that also makes a point; crime, betrayal and gunplay with a distinct social conscience. But if Audiard [...]
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