[spoiler alert] Kate Winslet, as well all know, has had a big year with Revolutionary Road and The Reader. Both are decent films that I really would like to cheer for, though they never seem to reach beyond the B+ range; they both just fall short of being excellent. The Reader role, was, to be [...]

I’ve been waiting for this film for a long time. It’s a film where Van Damme plays himself, or rather, a version of himself. There are plenty of things taken from his real life–his career as an action star, his marital problems, drinking, drugs, etc. However, all of this is a backdrop for a fictional [...]

You half-know what to expect, stylistically, from a movie like this: a liberal dollop of Coen Brothers’ dry humor, dripping down a seemingly (but not actually) complicated plot. I personally thought that the characters were funny, especially Brad Pitt and George Clooney, but i think that more critical reviewers were less impressed, especially in light [...]

Brilliant. One of the most masterful of war films I have ever seen. The Russians have a singular flair and talent for war films–I mean this black and white, grainy dramas where humanity is thrown back upon itself. In the unrelenting bleakness of the Russian front, everything is stripped to its bare essentials. Food. Survival. [...]

I actually watched this a couple of weeks ago but never got the chance to write about it: There’s a Channel4.com review which sums it up nicely:
For Blier, the surreal agent provocateur who would make a career out of winding up the bourgeoisie, the film’s male aggression, absurd black humour and absence of any [...]

I was never a huge fan of the X-files series but I was quite looking forward to this movie ever since I first saw the previews when at a movie theater in Paris. I just got the DVD in Shanghai and watched it just now. What can I say? Like the blogger at Apropos of [...]

Netease has a bunch of spoof movie posters featuring Chinese Olympic athletes. You can vote for the ones that you like. Here are some of the ones that I liked or thought were nominally interesting, featuring Yao Ming, Liu Xiang and the usual suspects:

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This is the first time that I have ever seen Wong Kar-wai without his trademark sunglasses. I never realized his face was so big;
evidently the shades he wears occupy a good part of his face. He was in Bhutan for the wedding of Tony Leung and Carina Lau
and lots of other Hong Kong celebs, such [...]

I don’t think I know enough about Van Sant’s ouevre to really say anything about him, but I do know that he’s gay and that as an auteur, his commercial films from “Finding Forrester” to “Good Will Hunting” and the more arty “My Own Private Idaho”, “Gerry”, “Elephant”, and his early work “Mala Noche” all [...]