Little Ashes is a melodrama about the gay closet focusing on poet Frederico García Lorca’s love for painter Salvador Dalí when both were students just before the Spanish Civil War. As schoolmate Luis Buñuel womanizes in the distance, Lorca and Dalí torment and tease each other due to social and personal repression. Director Paul Morrison
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An amazing Q&A session followed the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Outrage, Kirby Dick’s documentary condemning closeted gay Republicans. Instead of the usual self-congratulatory ass-kissing in question form, the choir that Dick preaches to through his facile, hot-topics docs nearly rebelled. There was genuine inquiry about Dick’s facile, scattershot methods. At a film festival! In
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A possibly great filmmaker has arrived to restore cinema’s sanity against such sick minds as Neil LaBute, Michael Haneke, Lars Von Trier, Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes. Austrian director-writer Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (his fifth film but the first to be released in the United States) provides a cure for sick cinema by avoiding the
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Jim Jarmsuch has been responsible for many of the dullest hours ever spent at the movies. His new The Limits of Control is no different. It’s another deliberate excursion into hipster eccentricity as Lone Man (Isacch De Bankolé) helps smuggle diamonds from France to Spain and dispatches a Mr. Big type. Jarmusch still doesn’t know
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Dito Montiel meet James Toback. The directors of this week’s two evocatively titled boxing films—Montiel’s Fighting and Toback’s Tyson—share a distinct interest in the public expression of class, race and male sexuality. Each filmmaker’s approach to storytelling derives from autobiographical impulses: Toback’s career reflects a background of relative Manhattan privilege, Montiel’s reflects working-class Queens. They
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In the late 1950s, the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray adapted a popular Bengali novel into a series of three movies, known as the Apu Trilogy. The result was one of the harshest and most beautiful coming-of-age stories ever filmed, a remarkable synthesis of realism and fable, agony and uplift. Ray’s patient attention to domestic routines,
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In 1975—just a year before the United States Bicentennial—Robert Altman’s Nashville, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line were an artistic triumvirate, each a boldly innovative examination of multicultural American experience. These film/literature/theatrical experiments advanced their respective art forms—and national self-awareness. None of them have been surpassed, but they’ve all been betrayed—by television.
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State of Play’s only point of interest is its dramatization of journalists’ professional anxiety as Washington Globe ace reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) compares himself to cub reporter Della Frye (Rachel McAdams): “I’m overfed, too expensive and take way too long.” Editrix Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren) reminds both of them that the digital age is
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After 1984’s heavy-metal satire This Is Spinal Tap started the mockumentary craze, most documentary makers pandered to audiences through sarcasm and propaganda. But the true-life heavy-metal Anvil finally—beautifully—restores the genre.    
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Midway through Observe and Report, the humor turns unbelievably nasty. This Seth Rogen comedy about mall cop Ronnie Barnhardt becomes a haven for the benighted, envious and spiritually small. He goes from being an underdog rent-a-cop wannabe to a vengeful brute, obsessed with capturing a flasher as if going after Osama bin Laden
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