There’s really no arguing the fact that South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup was an inspirational moment of collaborative triumph for a country healing the wounds of the past.  The occasion was an against-all-odds statement of progress and togetherness.  It announced to the world that a nation had chosen to look to [...]

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It’s a little difficult to argue with the nostalgia that Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog” conjures.  As effective as Pixar has been for over a decade and as exciting as the computer-generated leaps have been in animation, there is something to be said about a well-crafted, traditional piece of animated feature filmmaking.
Filmmakers Ron Clements [...]

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Filmmaker Robert Zemeckis’s allegiance to performance-capture technology these last few years has begun to wear thin for some.  But the fascinating thing to note is an artist improving his craft before our very eyes over the course of three separate productions.
“The Polar Express” in 2004 didn’t hit the mark for a great many, the “uncanny [...]

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London Film Festival
A bright, slight, mostly enjoyable portrait of the formative years of John Lennon, artist-turned-filmmaker Sam Taylor-Wood’s “Nowhere Boy” opens with a nudge-nudge tease, as the singular opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” reverberates through the theater over a shot of the 18 year-old Lennon running to school.
That single-second strum, however, is all [...]

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Not my most successful day at the London Film Festival today, as a communication error kept me out of the fest’s final “Samson and Delilah” screening — vexing partly because it leaves a significant gap in the collective review I had planned to do of multiple foreign Oscar contenders next week, but more simply because [...]

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I realize I’ve dropped the ball somewhat with my festival updates — between the to-and-fro of festival business, other writing tasks and the occasional impulse to have a personal life, a backlog longer than I care to count has accumulated of films yet to be discussed. Expect that to be partially rectified over a quieter [...]

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London Film Festival
With apologies to Pete Townshend, the kids are most certainly not alright.
Such is the message we seem to be gleaning from the cinema of 2009, as a vast range of unrelated titles – “Precious,” “Coraline,” “Dogtooth,” “Antichrist,” “Fish Tank,” even “An Education” – appear united in visiting the physical and/or psychological damage wrought [...]

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I am presently seeing films at the London Film Festival at a greater pace than I can write them up — expect a round-up of curt (by my standards, at least) capsule reviews either later today or tomorrow.
Some films, however, demand to be reviewed in pairs, as is the case with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest, the [...]

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It’s been a busy weekend at the festival, but aside from “Up in the Air” — which I finally encountered this morning and will offers some thoughts on in due course — it’s also been a rather low-key one. Several films I had seen in pre-screenings made their London debut; I’ll round them up [...]

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Once more, Friday’s major festival screenings covered ground I’d already trod in Venice — the day’s glossiest gala slot was reserved for “The Road” (which you know did little for me), with a less prominent early evening slot for Tom Ford’s “A Single Man” (which did rather more).
Given the current buzz levels for each film, [...]

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As if sympathetic to the fact that I’d have a pounding hangover from Wednesday’s swish opening party in Chelsea, festival organizers were kind enough to schedule a film I’d already seen, “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” for the next morning, affording me a much-needed lie-in.
Still, George Clooney’s second go-round on the LFF red carpet [...]

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London Film Festival
Rather like two well-matched friends that one sets up on a failed blind date, Roald Dahl and Hollywood really ought to have got along better over the years. Taken at face value, Dahl’s rightly beloved children’s books should be a cinch to film: the concepts are high, the imagery vivid, the storytelling swift [...]

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There is a film that succeeds as a cerebral drama, concerned with the impact of war on the individual, free of the genre’s typical tropes and remarkably fresh as a result.  And believe it or not, I’m not talking about “The Hurt Locker.”
Of course, it is unfair to Oren Moverman’s “The Messenger” to so quickly [...]

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“As long as one is alive, one is all right.”
These words, spoken with pithy irony by John Malkovich halfway through Steve Jacobs’s brilliant, bruising adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Disgrace” — which opens Stateside tomorrow — encapsulate a post-apartheid South Africa more riven by crime and inequality than the bandages of democracy can cover. [...]

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Venice Film Festival
In a curious way, revered fashion designer Tom Ford had a defined auteur’s stamp before he ever so much as shot a frame of his debut film: from his louche advertising campaigns to his infamous curation of Vanity Fair’s 2007 Hollywood issue to the forms and textures of his designs themselves, Ford has [...]

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