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 …

In the wake of eye-opening exposés like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Slow Food movement hero Michael Pollan’s thoughtful study The Omnivore’s Dilemma, director Robert Kenner explores America’s industrial food chain in Food, Inc. Kenner tracks the flaws of large-scale chicken and cattle production, among other facets of the industry, and celebrates the virtues of small organic farms and educated consumerism. Much of the personal testimony is harrowing (a mother who lobbies on behalf of her young son who died from E. coli poisoning), and occasionally it’s inspiring (hardcore …

Something of a surprise from the director of the Korean cult classic Oldboy, Park Chan-wook’s Thirst is, like all vampire movies, a really screwed-up love story, and like Park best-loved films, a sometimes hyper-violent meditation on guilt, suffering and vengeance. A saintly priest (The Host’s Song Kang-ho) offers himself as a test subject for a vaccine meant to cure a virus that causes a deadly leprosy. Things go badly, but the dying cleric is miraculously healed by a blood transfusion that profoundly alters his own biology. Much to his …

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 …

Originally published February 2008 in the New York Sun.
Don’t look now. While studios have been busy hyping a receding wave of torture-themed horror films — namely the “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises, as well as overbaked remakes of classics such as “Halloween” and “The Hills Have Eyes” — the horror genre is quietly experiencing a resurgence of its low-budget, high-anxiety, 1970s vitality.

One sure sign is the return of zombie auteur George A. Romero, whose seminal 1968 shocker “Night of the Living Dead” was a template for the contemporary horror film as …

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. …