Kim Hye-ja’s performance as this film’s namesake is something that no one is likely to soon forget. If there’s ever a Hollywood remake (the Coen Brothers come to mind), the role would snag an Oscar nomination for any actress-of-a-certain-age who was up to the task. Kim plays Hye-ja, the mother of her small town’s contemporary version of the village idiot: an indulgent, infantile 27-year-old named Do-joon (Bon Win). Their relationship is creepy enough, epitomized in a scene where she tilts a bowl of broth to her son’s lips as he …

Movies are rarely, if ever, as whirringly rich and strange as House. The 1977 fairy-tale-as-fever-dream from Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi was the debut of a guy who was known mostly for his TV commercials, notably a popular series for the men’s cologne Mandom starring American tough guy icon Charles Bronson. Given a shot at making his first feature by a struggling studio that had nothing to lose, Obayashi did what any aspiring auteur would do: He went to his 11-year-old daughter Chigumi for ideas.
What they came up with is a …

Turner Prize-winning British artist Steve McQueen makes his feature debut with Hunger (Criterion Blu-Ray), a tough, soul-rattling film about brutality and deprivation conceived as a sensory overload. Not a bio-pic in the conventional mode, the drama takes an inside-out view of events leading to the 1981 hunger strike and death of Irish Republic Army activist Bobby Sands, and nine others, in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. The shit-covered cell walls, the obscenely brutal beatings, even the seemingly mundane act routine of someone washing their hands, boast an acutely amplified resonance, as …

If this year’s Academy Awards producers are foolhardy enough, they could score the show’s customary satirical opening musical bit to R.E.M.’s Nineties anthem “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” Celebrating the post-apocalyptic jollies that destructo epics like Terminator Salvation, 2012 and The Book of Eli (due in January from the Hughes Brothers), the ceremony could acknowledge big-screen doom-and-gloom while glancing sideways at the recession and the rapid decline of studios like Miramax and the Weinstein Co.
Of course leave it to the Weinsteins …

What’s all this nonsense about the “silence” of the lambs? The sheep who populate nearly every frame of Sweetgrass are bleat merchants of a spectacularly boisterous order. They may seem gentle and easily persuaded, as they cluster in a vast, moving carpet of snowy wool, kept in regimented order by attentive sheep dogs. But these hooved beasts are louder than bombs. That incessant bahhhh, in all its variations, makes a hypnotic soundtrack for this absorbed and absorbing documentary about the end of an era: The camera follows Montana rancher Lawrence …

When people talk about “the British gangster film” these days, what they talk about is the post-gangster film. Not the Guy Ritchie crap, but gleefully malicious, verbally acrobatic, horrifically violent and oddly comic films like In Bruges and Sexy Beast – in which Cockney thugs disperse themselves upon the European Continent in a bid to get away from all that, only to come face to face with what they fear the most.
Newly released by Criterion, The Hit (1984) is an underappreciated gem that supplied the template for this mini-genre. Directed …

Originally published at Stop Smiling Online.
Lars von Trier has said that Antichrist was made out of the psychological tar pit of a grave depression, that it was an artistic lifeline when he felt unsure that he would ever make another film again. This could explain some of the outrageously nasty torments visited on its only characters: a historian writing a book on witchcraft (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her psychiatrist husband (Willem Dafoe). In an opening sequence — so lushly imagined in creamy black-and-white that you’d think the fiercely ascetic von Trier …

Originally published at Stop Smiling Online.
With the real-life Austrian android-turned-politico Arnold Schwarzenegger struggling to terminate California’s cash crisis, the notion of a fourth Terminator film, set in a meticulously annihilated post-apocalyptic vision of the Golden State, is juicily ironic. It’s easy to image some laid-off breadwinner herding the brood out of his foreclosed suburban tract house for a day at the multiplex, gazing upon the $200 million, CGI-wizarded wreckage, and thinking, “Hey, that doesn’t look so bad.”
Visually, at least, T4 is stunning: The year 2018 looks like Hell on a …

Originally published at Stop Smiling Online.
A nation of suburban dads working through their mid-rock crises through repeat big-screen flat panel viewings of This Is Spinal Tap and VH-1 rockumentaries has necessarily lowered expectations for the fret-wizard power summit occasioned by the new documentary It Might Get Loud. I say “documentary” because it’s a non-fiction work. But the film’s lavish production values, transcontinental location jumping, blockbuster producer (The Dark Knight’s Thomas Tull), and handpicked Oscar-winning director (Davis Guggenheim of An Inconvenient Truth) actually suggest something more like a presentation.
“Electric guitar is …

After a long winter snooze we’re back to regular updates here. Just to get things started, here’s a recent look at the new Criterion box set focusing on the early 1960s work of Japanese director Shohei Imamura – with a jump to GreenCine.com’s venerable daily blog, whose Powers That Be were generous enough to commission the piece.
Although he bowed out in 2006, at age 79, as a globally revered grand master of cinema—his nation’s greatest living filmmaker—Shohei Imamura may have simply refined his touch over a 45-year career so …

PEAKIN’ AT THE BEACON Jagger and Aguilera, the post-millennial Tina Turner/Merry Clayton, in Shine a Light.
Nobody loves the Rolling Stones as obsessively as Martin Scorsese. Think about the way Mick Jagger’s spastic shrieks on “Monkey Man” captured the paranoid craving of the cocaine-addicted mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in Goodfellas. Or the fateful way the guitars of “Gimme Shelter” shimmer like an elegy over the graves of dead Irish cops in The Departed. Scorsese’s 1995 film Casino even used two separate versions of “Satisfaction” to mark the passage of time. …