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 …

This is the extended remix of an interview that originally appeared at Stop Smiling Online.
Milos Forman answers the phone, and the hectoring cadence of MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews is audible in the background of his Connecticut home. He briefly says hello and turns down the volume.
I see you’re hooked on the political channel.
Yes.
What did you make of the elections?
Well, it was entertaining to watch, it was very interesting. It made me feel good about the whole democratic process here. Hearing so many opinions from so many sides. It was …

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 …