Cinefile

Breaking Upwards

On DVD
Mar 21, 2011

Breaking up is hard. Twentysomethings who prefer to wing it as bachelors are largely motivated by this fact. Relationships can be great but when they don't work out--for whatever reason--the damage is irreversible. Significant others take a part of us when they leave our lives and for that reason we feel angry, cheated, sad or even dumbfounded that things turned out the way they did. In Daryl Wein's Breaking Upwards, the onscreen romantic couple is aware of the void caused by breaking up--so they decide to marginalize the pain by breaking up...slowly. Inspired by an actual experiment ...

Let Me In

On DVD
Feb 04, 2011

I still think Tomas Alfredson's Swedish film Let The Right One In is the best vampire film to come along in quite some time. Stunningly photographed, eerily atmospheric and featuring an unorthodox narrative (grade school bullying bunched with a broken home family dynamic, pubescent love and a hundred year old male vampire who looks like a twelve year old girl), Let The Right One In set the benchmark for all bloodsucking screen stories to follow. So a mere two years after this Swedish gem wowed U.S. audiences along the festival circuit, Matt Reeves' (Cloverfield) English-language remake, Let Me ...

Alamar

On DVD
Jan 27, 2011

There aren't a whole ton of films these days that can get away with minimal dialogue and an extremely simple premise. The movies that do try the meditative approach (such as the “mumblecore” genre) commonly fall into pits of self-indulgent meandering and smeared impact. I feel that for such an aesthetic to resound successfully, a contemporary filmmaker has to prove an unshakeable confidence in his or her subject matter and display simplicity in an engrossing way. Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio's Alamar comes close to achieving this idea but falls just short of it.

The film tells the story of a ...

Holy Rollers

On DVD
Jan 20, 2011

The drug world can be a grimy, seedy and ultimately fatal type of terrain to call home. Usually, the movies present drug trafficking as a woven global network comprised of small vendors and big fish (which are sometimes tied to state governing entities). Other times, we get more intimate plots that focus on a handful of players who are associated to the drug trade by need or convenience. In Joshua Marston's Maria Full Of Grace, we followed a pregnant Colombian teenager who travels through U.S. customs with balloon pellets of cocaine in her stomach (she later "drops" them ...

Cronos

On DVD
Dec 16, 2010

Narrative movies built on contradictions (whether purposeful or not) are tricky propositions. I feel that it is only with the occurrence of a “happy accident” or a “beautiful disaster” that such films are worth the time spent to watch them. More often then not, however, narrative movies with a loose sense of purpose and a sporadic tone end up feeling far too slippery. Any satisfaction to be found in such an experience is elusive.

That notion, I feel, describes Guillermo del Toro's debut feature film, Cronos, quite well. He introduces you to a hall of odd trinkets and artifacts ...

Paths Of Glory

On DVD
Dec 13, 2010

Paths of Glory embodies so much of the Stanley Kubrick canon (a searing dialogue that is largely mortified by human vanity and fallacy), it's a wonder that so many cinephiles revel in it for its technical feats instead. Then again, much of the visual scheme--single take tracking shots--in Paths became both a landmark achievement and eventual Kubrick trademark. But for an American anti-war film--especially one whose principal characters are either French or German--Kubrick's Paths of Glory oddly works more as a warning against the values of war as opposed to reflecting on the psychological strain that war births ...