Thus far Daniel Craig’s James Bond films – Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace – have been a mixed bag. While the former was a successful reinvention of agent 007 the latter threw most of those intriguing concepts away in favor of a humdrum story about water being our most precious resource. However, despite the […]
Rants & Raves
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: Antiviral (Dir. Brandon Cronenberg USA/Canada 2012 )
If nothing else, Brandon Cronenberg has been quite unafraid to make a film that could pass for an earlier one of his father’s. Antiviral boasts a fertile premise that ties biological interference to celebrity obsession, is very handsomely mounted, and features a fine, committed performance from Caleb Landry Jones in the lead. But the title […]
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: A Highjacking (Kapringen) (Dir. Tobias Lindholm Denmark 2012 )
Director Tobias Lindholm’s first feature film R was a gritty prison drama that upheaved the generic genre conventions that came before. His second feature takes a drastic look at a very topical subject, and one very much ignored in detail in the media–except for the sensationalizing of pirates sailing the open sea. A Highjacking is […]
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: Like Someone In Love (Dir. Abbas Kiarostami France/Japan 2012 )
Abbas Kiarostami has gone to Japan, and why not? Like Someone In Love is less obviously tricksy than his last, and his first outside of Iran, Certified Copy [2010]; and it reveals a little more of what was obvious all along – that Kiarostami’s interests lie in people, identity, and communication (between characters, and with […]
Poetry in Motion: Carax and Lavant and the Holy Motors
In Leos Carax’s rather wonderful and fantastic new film Holy Motors, there are several points at which one may wonder what is real. The answer is none of it, and all of it. It begins explicitly as a dream, after all, in a cinema, with Carax the dreamer himself; but it is a dream of […]