Entries from Deep Focus Movie Reviews + Weblog tagged with '2006'
Deja Vu (2006)
Certainly Tony Scott’s best movie since Enemy of the State, and probably since the Tarantino-scripted True Romance (or maybe Crimson Tide?), Deja Vu is a surprisingly engaging story of voyeurism, obsession, and a very odd complication in an unusual...
Notes on a Scandal (2006)
Patrick Marber shovels pages of voiceover into Judi Dench's lap and somehow she makes them sound brilliant and scabrous. Trouble sets in when the schoolmarmish Barbara (Dench) first goes to dine with the free-spirited Sheba (Cate Blanchett), as director...
Perfume (2006)
Tom Tykwer is not a favorite -- I liked Run Lola Run well enough on a single viewing, but watching it a second time was an exercise in diminishing returns, and I had little use for The Princess and...
Strange Weather: 2006 Top 10
I don’t know where you live, but the weather here in New York is "unseasonably mild." (Temperatures in the 50s, no snow as of January 4 for the first time in freaking recorded history — a real climate-change scenario.) Coincidentally,...
Venus (2006)
From the opening scenes, it’s clear that Venus intends a bracing unsentimentality in its depiction of aging geezers on the London thespian scene. Peter O’Toole’s Maurice isn’t one of those stock characters, like the Lovable Codger or the Misanthropic...
Children of Men (2006)
Easy to watch and hard to shake, Children of Men is an action-adventure film/socio-political nightmare. The fuel that makes the engine run is a dystopian conceit about human infertility on a sudden, species-wide scale — and the violence and...
The Painted Veil (2006)
The odd, unbalanced structure of The Painted Veil becomes apparent early on, when an opening scene set in the lush green wilds of China, where a couple of Westerners sit silent and unperturbed by the falling rain, is abruptly...
The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
Will Smith suffers so comprehensively at the hands of an uncaring world in The Pursuit of Happyness — his car is towed, his wife abandons him, he’s jailed, and he’s finally kicked out of his apartment — that I...
Apocalypto (2006)
Like his movie about William Wallace and the one about Christ, Mel Gibson’s unsubtle film about the final days of the Mayans is soaked in blood, sweat and tears. A small tribe of happy-go-lucky hunters lives with their wives...
Breaking and Entering (2006)
I was walking on 57th Street the other day, heading toward the Hudson River, and noticed the side-street façade of the new Time Warner building, constructed at great expense just off Columbus Circle, for the first time. “It looks...
Curse of the Golden Flower (2006)
Gong Li plus Chow Yun Fat sounds like some kind of superstar pairing, all right. Too bad it comes on the downslope of a precipitous decline in the watchability of director Zhang Yimou's work. Gong is the Empress and...
Turistas (2006)
The latest in a new cycle of horror film where the money shots depict beautiful young people getting terrorized, paralyzed, maimed, disfigured, dismembered or simply humiliated is Turistas, which explores cloddishness and xenophobia among the beautiful people traveling abroad....
The Nativity Story (2006)
Mary, mother of Jesus — the ultimate troubled teen.
The Fountain (2006)
The Fountain seems like a damned curious piece of work until you realize the likely circumstances of its creation. Unable to shake the germ of a great idea having to do with a fallen Spanish conquistador, the Mayan Tree of...
FUR: an imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus
There's something playful, or willfully perverse, about casting one of the world's most spectacularly photogenic actresses in the role of a photographer.
Saw III (2006)
I couldn't watch Saw III without thinking of reality TV shows like Fear Factor. Can it be a deliberate parody?
The King (2005)
“Do you believe in God?” Elvis (Gael García Bernal) asks 16-year-old Malerie (Pell James), after she says his cursing bothers her.
Flags of Our Fathers (2006)
Flags of Our Fathers is a sensitive but slightly preachy picture aimed at an audience that probably feels Saving Private Ryan is the last word on the spectacular horrors of World War II.
Babel (2006)
This is the Cinema of Escalating Crises, in which the whims and misfortunes of people on any given continent can have a profound impact thousands of miles away.
EDMOND
Director Stuart Gordon put in time as an enfant terrible on the Midwest theater scene before making his feature film debut in 1985 with Re-Animator, one of the greatest — and sickest — horror comedies. He never quite recaptured...
Tideland (2005)
Terry Gilliam has made a living out of movies that dance along the line separating the physical world from that of the imagination, serenity from hubbub, and sanity from madness. In a career that sprang from the organized chaos that...
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2006)
Saddening but riveting, and possessed of a positively wicked wit, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is executed with the sensitivity of great literature and the panache of bravura filmmaking....
Crank (2006)
If you favor movies that boast bold visuals and brash action, you may well find Crank to be a veritable font of cinematic pleasure.
Volver (2006)
The title of Pedro Almodovar's new movie, Volver, literally means "to return." But, at least when pronounced with an American accent, it's not hard to imagine an aural pun referring to a certain part of a woman's anatomy.
Hollywoodland (2006)
When I was a kid growing up in Southern Colorado, my grandfather had one of those black-and-white TV sets with a screen a few inches across that sat in a box a little bit smaller than a tower PC case.
Silent Hill
Snakes on a Plane may be a mediocre, lowbrow fright film, but Silent Hill is something much worse — a laughably pretentious one. Radha Mitchell, an actress who deserves better parts than this, plays Rose, who finds herself stranded in...
Half Nelson
Ryan Gosling anchors Half Nelson with a sturdy, utterly credible performance as a crack-addicted Brooklyn schoolteacher struggling to keep his life together.
The Great Yokai War (2005)
Imagine the Japanese unquiet-ghost anthology Kwaidan cross-bred with The Neverending Story and directed by Terry Gilliam. That's the gist of The Great Yokai War, an honest-to-god children's movie from the chameleonic Japanese genre director Takashi Miike.
Miami Vice (2006)
There’s a scene somewhere in the middle of Miami Vice where Crockett, feeling some oats, sensibly decides to sow them in the direction of Gong Li. They get on a speedboat and whiz off into the ocean blue. You...
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
In the near-future science fiction world of A Scanner Darkly, narc agents are polymorphous detectives, wearing “scramble suits” that cycle, both visually and aurally, through scores of identity fragments to avoid detection by face-recognition systems. It’s a striking idea...
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