Catching Up With 2010: Capsule Review – Let Me In

Refocusing the context of Tomas Alfredson's 2008 film adaptation of John Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In, Matt Reeves has created one of the best American horror films in years. It's not just that the film is a more visceral experience with a more horrifying undertone, but it's also a more emotional experience with better acting by its young actors (the fantastic Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Moretz). I was completely floored by how much I liked Let Me In. That's mostly because I wasn't expecting...

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Ken Russell: Altered States

Heading into the 80's, Russell was, to that point, at the nadir of his career. He made two of his worst and least successful films (Lisztomania and Valentino) after having tasted his biggest success (both critically and commercially) with the fantastic Tommy. It seemed that Russell had traded in his patented stick used to jab at the ribs of organized religion for a more polarizing and bombastic approach in the study of what it means to be a celebrity ( in the case of Liszt, the first ever pop...

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The American (2010)

The American may be indebted to the existential crime cinema of one Jean-Pierre Melville, but it also owes a great deal to Sergio Leone, and I don't think director Anton Corbijn (who directed the great Joy Division biopic Control) is shy about the fact that even though he's trying to make an existential thriller, he's also making a Leone-esque western that takes an oblique approach to telling its classic story about a protagonist who says more with his eyes than with words. As Herbert Grönemeyer's...

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Catfish

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Catfish is that its filmmakers – Henry Joost, Areil Schulman, and Yaniv Schulman – were naïve enough to think that its viewers couldn't see what was coming, or that they actually thought anyone think they were genuine, interesting people. Ever since AOL chatrooms and IM, people have been fabricating lives on the interweb. Now with the ease of social networking via Facebook, it's all the easier. Fear not: I have not given anything away about the film's super-secret...

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Catching Up With 2010: Capsule Review – The Ghost Writer

There is a moment about halfway through The Ghost Writer where I had forgotten just how long I had been watching the movie. It felt like it had been about 20 minutes when in reality it was about 1 hour and 20 minutes. Roman Polanski's thriller is so efficient and so well made and polished that I lost myself in it. It's the type of thriller that relies on the tired old cliché of being "Hitchcockian", yet the cliché is apt because the film is as taut and expertly crafted as anything Hitch made. It's...

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Catching Up With 2010: Capsule Review – The Square

The Square is one of the best, most cruelly ironic neo-noirs since Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan. I love the restraint from the filmmakers where we hear things rather than see them, or how they simply let every ironic, violent, and cruel situation unfold without rushing through a single moment. It's rare to find a neo-noir these days that takes so much pleasure in the slow-burn downward spiral of its characters. The Square reminded me more of A Simple Plan than it did Blood Simple (the one movie everyone...

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