Notebook Reviews: Darezhan Omirbaev's "Student"
Daniel KasmanThe Kazakh master’s 2012 Cannes entry finally sees its U.S. theatrical release.
reviews
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Notebook Reviews: Ulrich Seidl's "Paradise: Love"
Daniel KasmanThe first part in a trilogy of films on “paradise” by Austrian director Ulrich Siedl. Love focuses on sex tourism in Kenya.
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Romanian Orthodox: Cristian Mungiu's "Beyond the Hills"
Michael NordineCristian Mungiu’s film is a gorgeously austere and often exhilarating in its its slow-burning atmosphere of dread and sorrow.
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Notebook Reviews: Raúl Ruiz's "Night Across the Street"
Daniel KasmanSupposedly the final film for the Chilean master—and a rare Chilean production too—sees a man preparing for retirement and his death.
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Notebook Reviews: Walter Hill's "Bullet to the Head" & Álex de la Iglesia's "As Luck Would Have It"
Ignatiy VishnevetskyA master’s hackwork and a slicked-up cartoon.
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The Image Trap: Johnnie To's "Romancing in Thin Air"
Adam CookOn one of the unsung, under-seen, great films of 2012—a formalist exploration of the image-swapping between reality & cinema.
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Notebook Reviews: Christian Petzold's "Barbara"
Ignatiy VishnevetskyAn East German hospital circa 1980 becomes a locus of decision-making.
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The Monitor Mentality, or A Means to an End Becomes an End in Itself: Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty"
Ignatiy VishnevetskyA portrait of modern warfare as self-perpetuating technocracy.
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Notebook Reviews: John Hyams' "Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning"
Ignatiy VishnevetskyThe follow-up to Universal Soldier: Regeneration is a bleak, challenging genre hybrid.
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Notebook Reviews: Peter Chan's "Wu xia" a.k.a "Dragon"
Daniel KasmanA genre-bending, glossy mash-up of martial arts, detective story, period film, parental-domestic drama, and philosophical inquiry.
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Notebook Reviews: Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis' "Cloud Atlas"
Carson LundCloud Atlas is some kind of meteoric event, risking catastrophe at every turn and obliterating the sanctions of good taste.
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"Eating Raoul": A Voracious Enterprise
Celluloid Liberation FrontA film that walks the improbable line between trash and avant-garde, crying for (re-)discovery outside the realm of cult.