Entries from Deep Focus Movie Reviews + Weblog tagged with 'B+'
Black Book (2006)
Paul Verhoeven has received some of the stupider film reviews in recent history. I'm still floored by the number of people who see Robocop as an endorsement of, rather than satire on, the idea of unfettered and uncompromising law...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Baby Face (1933)
Notorious for its resolutely sordid look at a woman’s place in the American socioeconomic structure, circa 1933, Baby Face was the film that pushed the movie studios to start enforcing the production code that would, for decades forward, strictly...
Waterloo Bridge (1931)
The pre-Code Waterloo Bridge doesn’t boast early Barbara Stanwyck, but it’s a lot more fun than Baby Face. And auteurists may suspect the reason why — the man behind the camera was no less a heavyweight than James Whale....
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?
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...
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.
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.
The Brown Bunny (2003)
“If people are sitting there watching The Brown Bunny and waiting for the motel scene, then I just can’t relate to them,” says Vincent Gallo, who directed himself in a “motel scene” where he receives head from Chloë Sevigny....
Secret Things (2002)
There's a certain, distinctive sound -- at least there was in the days before six-channel digital mixes came into vogue, with their full dynamic range and dead-empty silences -- made by a woman's moans on a film's soundtrack. Especially...
Lilya 4-Ever (2002)
Swede Lucas Moodysson shares with fellow Scandinavian director Lars Von Trier sympathy for the travails of young women, a strong sense of melodrama, and an apparently unshaken belief in the lord God. Like Von Trier, he has a knack...
Titanic (1997)
From the underwater opening scenes, which are as neon-blue as anything from James Cameron's science fiction opus The Abyss, it's clear that Titanic will be a technophile's delight....
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