April 24, 2011
Black Swan is marked by Nathalie Portman's grandiose performance, but Aronofsky’s regresive aesthetic hinders the movie’s themes and narrative.
October 17, 2013
Shield of Straw My first film at Fantasia in 2013 was Takashi Miike’s Shield of Straw, one of the director’s contribution to the festival. Miike is a known workhorse, directing sometimes three films per year, in a myriad of genres and styles. Yet, there seems to be a connecting thread through his films, which feels harder to ascertain for me […]
March 26, 2010
Behind the Mask supposes that the horror stories that haunt Elm Street or Crystal Lake are elaborate hoaxes which elevate their authors to legendary status.
March 22, 2010
A reviewer compared City of God to Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) and many parallels could be made between the two. As they both fall into the genre of gangster films, they depict violence in a raw, uninhibited way, in a realist fashion. City of God, with its documentary-style aesthetic—camera shakes, voice-over narration, etc., uses that realism to emphasize its story’s […]
March 29, 2010
Michael Clayton suffers from its intellectualism, just as Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005) did, and never lets you connect to the stakes emotionally.