This past December the New York Film Critics Circle voted Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy the best movie of 1999 (Leigh also won best director). I mention this in part because I doubt you’ll see the British film winning the same accolades elsewhere this year. The Oscar givers, for example, seem more likely to give their Best […]
Movie Review
Posted inFilm & Television
Too normal?
It took about, oh, about 20 or 30 seconds for Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother to convince me that I was very likely watching one of the year’s great films. The Spanish movie opens with a sequence in which the credits shimmer onscreen in curlicued red script, then fade out again, as the camera […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Sense and memory
Sense and memoryBecause it hails from Lebanon and speaks a tongue other than English, Ziad Doueiri’s West Beirut obviously will be classified as a foreign film. But I would offer the following as a more useful point of reference: From Being John Malkovich to The Blair Witch Project and beyond, the past year has been […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Cultural leftovers
As you would hope of a movie so drolly titled, Chris Smith’s American Movie is a hoot and a half. And that figurative half is something that we don’t often encounter in movies that probe the lives of real-life Americans for their comic potential: a portion of true insight, tempered with both sympathy and modest […]