POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Danish director Suzanne Bier is a devotee of Lars Von Trier’s Dogme ethos and its constraints'natural lighting, naturalistic storytelling and the like'but she doesn’t use Dogme as a crutch. Her two films would work in any circumstances with...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Whatever you do, don’t pop into Dark Water if you’re in a low-down lousy mood and you’re looking for The Movies to supply a pick-me-up. Because one of the things this Asian-horror remake does really well is create the blackest of black...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - In the opening scene of Saving Face, a brilliant Chinese-American surgeon named Wilhelmina is wearing a mask. It’s one of those pore-opening concoctions designed to maintain eternal youth'and it’s also the first in a series of metaphors and...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Early in Reel Paradise, there’s an onscreen caption that tells far more of the story than anyone involved may have anticipated. It explains how John Pierson'independent film guru, filmmaker representative and author of the definitive indie-world...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - All over the country, little girls with equine fixations will be blinking dreamy eyes at their daddies and pleading please please prettyplease can we see the pony movie? And oddly enough, Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story is the cinematic equivalent of...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Everyone bitches at the movie industry for screwing up popular books, but Hollywood never gets nearly enough credit for the times it improves upon popular books. Remember how Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County was a painfully earnest...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - It’s probably much funnier if you’re already a bit of an Anglophile, as in you drink a lot of tea and long to attend a weekend house party in the 1930s at a manor in Sussex. You imagine taking the train down from London, and someone would...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - You know you’ve heard it before: “The book was so much better.” But how often have you been able to decide for yourself whether the person who said it was just showing off the fact that he or she had actually read a book? As the fall...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - If you’re expecting that Scream star Liev Schreiber will turn Everything Is Illuminated into the kind of visually flat performance showcase we tend to expect from actors-turned-directors, all you need to do is look at the appearance of the film’s...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - I want to live in a world written and directed by Cameron Crowe. Not the world of Vanilla Sky'let’s all just pretend that occurred in some alternate dream reality, shall we?'but the world of Say Anything, Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous. CroweWorld...