Monthly Archives: December 2006

How do you make a fairy tale with resonance? By treating the fantastical and the realistic worlds it contains with equal gravity and importance. In Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, the writer/director spins a darkly satisfying and terrifyingly emotional story about a young girl stuck between those worlds in Spain during WWII. Living with her mother on an isolated army outpost, her stepfather a cruel officer hunting down partisans from the just-finished civil war, the girl encounters a threatening satyr underground who charges her with three Herculean tasks in order to retake the mantle of princess which apparently she once carried. It’s a masterful and draining piece of work, gorgeous in its intensity and one of the best of the year. Don’t miss it.

My review ran on filmcritic.com. Link.

De Niro’s not exactly the first guy you’d think of to direct the sprawling and ambitious history-of-the-CIA epic The Good Shepherd, but in any case, it turns out he does the material well. The chilly, brainy script by Eric Roth (Munich, The Insider) follows Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) and a cast of dozens from the birth of the OSS (grandfather of the CIA) at Yale in the 1930s up through the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle. It’s not about these spymasters — whose craft is laid out here with fascinating attention to detail — losing their ideals during the hypocrisy of the Cold War but instead how these arrogant WASPs helped corrupt an entire nation.

My review ran on filmcritic.com. Link.

The classy bookend to his somewhat more prosaic Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima is a spare and melancholy war film that benefits from a tighter focus and smaller scale. While the first film was about a band of American soldiers caught up in the battle and the propaganda machinery which followed, this one is strictly about their opposites: the starving and abandoned Japanese island garrison who are expected to fight to their deaths, knowing that it will all most likely be a bloody waste. Ken Watanabe is (as usual) fantastic as the garrison’s real-life general, a wise and kind leader who studied in the U.S. before the war and seems reluctant to continue the fighting, though his sense of duty compells him to do so anyway. In the end, it’s about humanity, not heroics.

My review ran on filmcritic.com. Link.

Now is when it really starts, the middle weekend of December, when studios cram in all the films they need to play this year to qualify for Oscars. Two films that couldn’t be more different but are just about as worthy, albeit in very different ways. The first film is Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, an adaptation of a Joseph Kanon thriller about a reporter (George Clooney) digging into corruption in Berlin immediately after the end of the war. The plot is quick and dirty noir, and Soderbergh shot it beautifully in black and white, going so far as to emulate the filmmaking techniques of the period. Bracing stuff in the vein of The Third Man, and all the more enjoyable for the cynical stabs it takes at romanticized, Casablanca-style WWII drama; which will make people hate it even more. See it quickly, because this is a rough gem that will likely be extremely unpopular.

A world away from grimy postwar Berlin is the strobe-lit, thrilling, nearly frantic Bill Condon adaptation of the old Broadway standby Dreamgirls. The style is flashy almost (almost) to the point of annoyance, and the performances (with the exception of a wan Jamie Foxx) fantastic. Eddie Murphy proves that he’s far from dead, and newcomer Jennifer Hudson (as you will hear repeated many times over) basically blows the roof off with her rendition of the show’s signature ballad, “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going.” Opening today in limited release and then all over the country on Christmas Day. Not great art, but terribly enjoyable.

Definitely not for the faint of heart or lovers of linearity, David Lynch’s three-hour digital video nightmare Inland Empire opened recently in an exclusive two-week run at the IFC Center before leaking out to the rest of the country. I’d been disappointed with Lynch for some years now, work like Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway seeming like rather arbitrary and pretentious twaddle, albeit with some astounding visuals. The once-great director seemed lost, years away from such masterpieces as The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet, films that told great stories but integrated his skewed and perverse world view to create something entirely new. Years in the making, thrillingly abstract and horrifying, Inland Empire is that sort of film to make you remember what all the fuss over Lynch was all about.

My review, a rave of sorts, ran in Film Journal International. Link.

Opening in extremely limited release at occasional theaters and very likely to get lost in the December movie madness is the very worthwhile Argentinian film Family Law. A mordant comedy about an uptight law professor trying to get out from under the very sizeable shadow of his garrulous, beloved lawyer father, it has an easygoing way with its humor, taking a fair amount of pleasure poking fun at the hapless main character. There was some talk of an Oscar nomination for foreign film but with Volver and Pan’s Labyrinth sucking all the air out of the competition, that’s looking less likely. Small, but not to be ignored.

My review ran in Film Journal International. Link.