Like his debut, Primer, a rather simple premise becomes a larger fragmented tapestry as Carruth turns every detail of Upstream Color into a heady mash of subjective narrators and relativistic camera angles. This time around the narrative follows Kris, traumatized victim of a brainwashing, as she magnetically connects to another and they slowly, in unfolding… [Continue Reading]

Inglourious Basterds felt like a missed opportunity for Tarantino to do something sober and slow-boiling, an opportunity he declined in order to maintain his brand of quirk. Django Unchained in contrast feels like Tarantino pursuing every opportunity, as his string out of events takes us through more aspects of slave trade and antebellum Southern culture… [Continue Reading]

Fritz lights up a joint whilst being harangued by his fed-up housewife and flashes back and forward through time to other ‘lives’ of his, largely involving druggy phenomena, 70s era insanity, and a continuation of the look into the decaying immoral backdrop of the American streets. Missing some of the intensity and slow falling apart… [Continue Reading]

Sold mostly for Tommy Lee Jones’ performance as General Douglas MacArthur, Emperor nevertheless is set mostly around Gen. Fellers’ search for his lost love Aya while tasked by MacArthur to investigate the culpability of Emperor Hirohito for Japan’s war crimes during World War 2. The chisel-jawed blue-eyed blond-haired Matthew Fox as Fellers is a perfect… [Continue Reading]

Ip Man (2008): Ip Man earned a rapid cult status beyond the scope of most contemporary martial arts movies, partly because of the targeted mention that Ip Man is the master of Bruce Lee, but also because it’s that rare breed of kung fu movie that dispenses with the contrived set-pieces-towards-boss-lair set-up and actually contains… [Continue Reading]

Orson Welles’ most financially successful film has a plot that mirrors Hitchcock’s earlier Shadow of a Doubt (with a Nazi as opposed to a serial killer), a Welles monologue on the banality of evil that warms him up for his cuckoo clock speech in Reed’s later The Third Man, and an ending right out of… [Continue Reading]

Derek Jarman delves into the homoerotic subtext of Caravaggio’s paintings as well as muses on the possible romantic entanglement with one of his models and the model’s wife, in a movie that competes with the original paintings for visual splendor with superb production design. It also contains a calculated anachronistic quality that collapses past and… [Continue Reading]

Chilean director Ruiz takes on the post-impressionist painter’s biography, but he’s more interested in figures and ideas real and unreal surrounding the character of Klimt than his actual life story, resulting in a heady drama that feels more like one too many glasses of wine than cerebral. The best parts are when Ruiz keeps the… [Continue Reading]

Cracked.com columnist David Wong got his start with a cultastic horror comedy novel with its spoiler-mugging title that he delivered on an blog until it went viral and got published. Don Coscarelli of Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep fame picked it up and fell in love with it, and got Paul Giamatti so interested that Giamatti… [Continue Reading]