Mexican filmmakers may be doing for fantasy in film what Japan once did for animation. Just weeks after Alfonso Cuaron’s visually stunning Children of Men comes Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno), easily one of the best fantasy films of the last five years, and one of the year’s best films, period. […]
Zack Smith
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Posted inFilm & Television
Tom Tykwer’s Perfume
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer Opens Friday in select theaters Patrick Süskind’s 1986 novel Perfume has been a hot property for years. This portrait of a homicidally alienated individual was a favorite of Kurt Cobain, who based the song “Scentless Apprentice” on Nirvana’s In Utero album on Grenouille. On the other hand, Stanley Kubrick […]
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Mon Oncle
Jacques Tati’s comedies are divisive, not because they contain sex or violence (they don’t), but because some viewers wonder what’s supposed to be funny. Emphasizing visuals over plot, dialogue and story, Tati’s style is gentle, subtle and laid-backnot the type of comedy most people are used to in today’s cinema of footballs in the head […]
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The Golden Child
The Golden Child Colony Theatre, Raleigh Wednesday, Dec. 6, 7 p.m. Kick-off for the Colony’s new ’80s film series Do you ever feel old realizing a film from 1986 is now 20 years old? One of those films so damn ridiculous that you just have to sit back and enjoy it, The Golden Child remains […]
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Feeling the buzz: For Your Consideration and Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny
For Your Consideration opens Wednesday in select theaters. One of the greatest tricks in film comedy is self-awareness. Remember W.C. Fields flinching on cue as he waits for a handful of artificial snow to hit his face in The Fatal Glass of Beer? More recent, lowbrow comedies have elicited considerable laughs out of acknowledging the […]
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Stranger than Fiction
As Oedipal wreck Buster Bluth on the Emmy-winning Fox series Arrested Development, Tony Hale played a character whose hand was bitten off by a seal, whose mother enlisted him in the Army at the urging of a Michael Moore look-alike, and who had an affair with his mother’s best friend, played by Liza Minnelli. Hale […]
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Screening France
With the North Carolina Museum of Art attracting large crowds for its Monet in Normandy exhibit, museum officials are hoping that patrons coming out for the paintings will stay for its new film series. MASTERS OF FRENCH CINEMA, which started on Oct. 20 with Jules and Jim, features nine films reflecting the diversity of French […]
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Pretty haute machine
Marie Antoinette is a creamy French pastry of a film: sweet and lovely to look at, but not very filling. The movie hardly deserves the megaton bomb status it received at the Cannes Film Festivalwhere French moviegoers reportedly booed itbut it still falls short of telling a clear, relatable story. Kirsten Dunst stars as Marie […]
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The Prestige
The Prestige tries to make the point that it’s better not to know the truths behind an illusion, and does so by making these truths weird and confusing. Still, the set-up is entertaining and often absorbing. Based on a 1995 World Fantasy Award-winning novel by British writer Christopher Priest, The Prestige tells the story of […]
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Nearing Grace
On the late WB series Everwood, Gregory Smith gave one of the best portrayals of a thoughtful, alienated teenager on television; many female fans admit to a jailbait crush on his character. Smith gets a deserved lead role in Nearing Grace, written by Mean Creek‘s Jacob Aaron Estes, but the material is closer to a […]