Never one to decide on a single tone or milieu, Jarmusch followed his 1995 acid western “Lifeless Gentleman” with this modestly budgeted but equally ambitious film about a useless man of the different kind; as tends to occur with contract killers — such as being the 1 Alain Delon played in Jean-Pierre Melville’s instructive “Le Samouraï” — poor Ghost Pet soon finds himself being targeted from the same Guys who retain his services. But Melville was hardly Jarmusch’s only source of inspiration for this fin de siècle
“You say towards the boy open your eyes / When he opens his eyes and sees the light / You make him cry out. / Expressing O Blue come forth / O Blue arise / O Blue ascend / O Blue come in / I'm sitting with some friends in this café.”
Campion’s sensibilities speak to a consistent feminist mindset — they place women’s stories at their center and strategy them with the necessary heft and respect. There isn't any greater example than “The Piano.” Established during the mid-19th century, the twist around the classic Bluebeard folktale imagines Hunter as the mute and seemingly meek Ada, married off to an unfeeling stranger (Sam Neill) and delivered to his home about the isolated west coast of Campion’s own country.
A short while ago exhumed from the HBO sequence that saw Assayas revisiting the experience of making it (and, with no small number of panic, confessing to its continued hold over him), “Irma Vep” is ironically the project that allowed Assayas to free himself from the neurotics of filmmaking and tap into the medium’s innate perception of grace. The story it tells is a straightforward one particular, with endless complications folded within its film-within-a-film superstructure like the messages scribbled inside a toddler’s paper fortune teller.
The movie was inspired by a true story in Iran and stars the actual family members who went through it. Mere days after the news merchandise broke, Makhmalbaf turned her camera within the family and began to record them, directing them to reenact selected scenes depending on a script. The moral thoughts raised by such a technique are complex.
“Rumble inside the Bronx” may very well be set in New York (nevertheless hilariously shot in Vancouver), but this Golden Harvest production is Hong Kong towards the bone, plus the decade’s single giddiest display of why Jackie bhabhisex Chan deserves his Repeated comparisons to Buster Keaton. While the story is whatever — Chan plays a Hong Kong cop who comes to the massive Apple for his uncle’s wedding and uporn soon finds himself embroiled in some mob drama about stolen diamonds — the charisma is from the charts, the jokes join with the power of spinning windmill kicks, as well as Looney Tunes-like action sequences are more amazing than just about anything that had ever been shot on these shores.
Seen today, steeped in nostalgia for that freedoms of the pre-handover Hong Kong, “Chungking Express” still feels new. The film’s lasting power is especially local sex videos impressive within the face of such a fast-paced world; a world in which nothing could be more important than a concrete offer from someone willing to share the same future with you — even if that offer is composed over a napkin. —DE
“Confess it isn’t all cool calculation with you – that you’ve acquired a heart – even if it’s small and feeble and you will’t remember the last time you used it,” Marcia Gay Harden’s femme fatale demands of protagonist Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne). And for all its steely violence, this film features a heart as well.
No supernatural being or predator enters a single body of this visually economical affair, however the committed turns of its stars as they descend into madness, along with the piercing sounds of horrific events that we’re compelled to assume in lieu of seeing them for ourselves, are still more than adequate to instill a visceral anxiety.
Most American audiences had never seen anything quite like the Wachowski siblings’ signature cinematic experience when “The Matrix” arrived in theaters during the spring of 1999. A glorious mash-up from the pair’s long-time obsessions — everything from cyberpunk parables to kung fu action, brain-bending philosophy towards the instantly inconic influence known as “bullet time” — few aueturs have ever delivered such a vivid vision (times two!
But Makhmalbaf’s storytelling praxis is so patient and full of temerity that the film outgrows audio porn its verité-style portrait and becomes something mythopoetic. Like the allegory of the cave in Plato’s “Republic,” “The Apple” is ultimately an epistemological tale — a timeless parable that distills the wonders of the liberated life. —NW
Steven Soderbergh is obsessed with money, lying, and non-linear storytelling, so it was just a matter of time before he bought around to adapting an Elmore Leonard novel. And lo, from the year of xxnxx our lord 1998, that’s exactly what Soderbergh did, As well as in the process entered a fresh period of his career with his first studio assignment. The surface is cool and breezy, while the film’s soul is about regret in addition to a yearning for something more out of life.
“The Truman Show” will be the rare high concept movie that executes its eye-catching premise to complete perfection. The thought of a man who wakes around learn that his entire life was a simulated reality show could have easily gone awry, but director Peter Weir and screenwriter Andrew Niccol managed to craft a plausible dystopian satire that has as much to mention about our relationships with God since it does our relationships with the Kardashians.
Mambety doesn’t underscore his points. He lets Colobane’s turn toward mob violence materialize subtly. Shots of Linguere staring out to sea combine beauty and malice like couple things in cinema considering that Godard’s “Contempt.”