Dead Snow (Dod Sno), directed by Tommy Wirkola, is a Norwegian tongue-in-cheek comedy built around the premise that Nazis during World War II inhabited an Article Circle naval base at Oksfjord to harass shipping between England and Russia. The brutality of 300 Nazis toward the 3,000 townspeople ultimately resulted in a revengeful massacre, though some […]
Offspring of a Seattle Chinese matriarch are informed by her housekeeper that their mother is dead in Dim Sum Funeral, directed by Anna Chi. None of the children and their spouses have good memories of her, and they dislike one another, but when they meet at her residence, they are unhappy to be informed that
Departures (Okuribito), directed by Yôjirô Takita, features the traditional Japanese burial ceremony. In the beginning of the film, a symphony orchestra is shut down for lack of funds. Daigo Kobayashi (played by Masahiro Motoki), a cellist, takes his wife and two daughters to his family’s house in the north of Japan, where by chance he
KABEI–OUR MOTHER, DEMONSTRATES THE SUFFERING OF JAPANESE CIVILIANS DURING WORLD WAR II Directed by Yôji Yamada, Kabei–Our Mother (Kâbê), is a biopic of the Nogami family during the years 1940-1945. After a portrayal of the family’s woes in the first half of the film, one tragic death after another piles up, with a weeping unimaginable
ANGELS AND DEMONS PROVIDES A TRAVELOG OF ROME Following up the Da Vinci Code, the film Angels and Demons provides yet another treasure hunt for something important, but this time a bomb of several megatons in the form of a canister containing anti-matter stolen from an experimental CERN lab in Switzerland. The flask is supposed
LITTLE ASHES REVEALS THE LOVE AFFAIR BETWEEN SALVADOR DALÍ & FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA Directed by Paul Morrison, the slowmoving triple biopic Little Ashes begins in 1922, when Salvador Dalí y Domènech (played by Robert Pattinson) and Federico García Lorca (played by Javier Beltrán) are students so infatuated with each other’s genius that they fall in
AN AMERICAN AFFAIR EXPLOITS THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION In a story that could be compared with The Reader (2008), directed by William Olsson, a teenage schoolboy approaches an older woman with sex on his mind but gets caught in a deeper plot than he realizes. The boy, Adam Stafford (played by Cameron Bright), attends a Catholic
An American Affair Read More »
THE IMMIGRANT CRISIS BOILS OVER IN CROSSING OVER Immigration problems in the United States appear insoluble in Crossing Over, directed by Wayne Kramer, who has expanded his 1996 short film of the same title into a full-length drama. Rather than focusing on political options on a grand scale, the film features a variety of dilemmas
POLANSKI, UNAUTHORIZED TRIES TO EXPLAIN WHY THE DIRECTOR WENT OFF THE DEEP END From 1978, Roman Polanski has lived mostly in Paris, where he escaped to avoid a court order for a psychiatric evaluation before a trial to defend himself against several crimes. A sympathetic biopic, Polanski, Unauthorized, tries to explain his complex personality, including
Polanski, Unauthorized Read More »
TEACHERS LEARN FROM STUDENTS IN THE CLASS A French film, The Class (Entre les murs) seeks to portray the difficulties of instructing early teenage immigrant students in a Paris middle school. Based on the book by the director, Laurent Cantet, the main focus is on French language instructor François Marin (played by François Begaudeau) and