South Korea’s 2012 contender for a foreign language Oscar feels more like a war movie than a movie about the Korean war, right up until its pitilessly bleak final frames. Though the American presence in that war is peripheral to its story, Hollywood clichés pervade The Front Line, from its slate and sepia tones to its stock company of characters and dialogue that translates macho posturing into present-day slang. And yet the movie has its startling moments, moments with the spark of specificity and the bitter clarity of perspective. Those stabs of the unexpected culminate in an ending that refuses to raise even the mildest or most melancholy flag of redemption.
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The great Fifth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yimou has gone from having films like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern banned in his homeland of China to directing the lavish opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, his more recent work taking place in the safer territory of the grandiose historical melodrama of Curse of the Golden Flower and the Nicholas Sparks-worthy sentimentality of Under the Hawthorn Tree. Zhang has insisted that he's not interested in politics, a tack that certainly seems to have its benefits: With an estimated budget of around $90 million, The Flowers of War is one of the most, if not the most, expensive Chinese production to date, it stars Christian Bale and it's China's Oscar submission. But that doesn't mean that Zhang's latest output should be dismissed offhand as nationalist propaganda.
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One of the most fascinating and intimate moments in Frederick Wiseman’s Crazy Horse, a peek behind the shimmery veil of Paris’s legendary semi-nude cabaret, is the one in which the club’s no-nonsense manager, Andrée Deissenberg, tells a reporter that women find the performances just as compelling as men do, if not more so – that watching this highly orchestrated display of beauty on-stage speaks to them in a way that goes far beyond garden-variety titillation. “The key to eroticism is the woman,” she says flatly, a statement the reporter doesn’t seem to fully agree with, though he at least has the good sense to bow to her authority on the matter.
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Mickey (Michael Biehn), the paranoid building superintendent unwillingly responsible for allowing the characters in The Divide to survive the apocalypse, didn't plan for or want company. And who can blame him? These people are awful. Like so many groups left in a survival situations (at least in movies, books and MTV reality shows), they shed their veneer of civilization with alarming rapidity as their lives take a turn for the worse.
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It takes at least two things to make a terrific documentary: A great subject and a light but deft touch. Susanne Rostock’s Sing Your Song, which traces the career of Harry Belafonte with a specific focus on the singer and actor’s social activism, certainly has the former -- it’s the latter that’s lacking. But if nothing else, Sing Your Song works as a testament to Belafonte’s drive and dedication to causes well outside the usual goals of simply making money. If you don’t know much about Belafonte beyond the fact that he was that great-looking guy who had a hit in the '50s with “The Banana Boat Song,” Rostock’s documentary is as good a place as any to start.
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Savvier and less cartoonish than those posters of Mark Wahlberg with stacks of cash taped to his famous torso might have you believe, Contraband is a remake of the 2008 Icelandic smuggling thriller Reykjavík-Rotterdam, directed by the original's star, Baltasar Kormákur. The action's been transported to New Orleans-Panama City, the goods upgraded from bootlegged liquor to counterfeit cash, and the whole enterprise daubed with some Hollywood gloss, but it's still an obligingly tense, scruffy addition to the one-last-crime genre.
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It’s hard to say whether Patric Chiha’s unabashedly out-there drama Domain is actually good or whether it simply nuzzles very cozily against the shoulder of so-bad-it’s-good. After seeing the movie twice, I’m inclined to say Domain splits the difference -- Chiha knows when the story is wobbling off the rails of credibility and leans into the turn, embracing the narrative’s full-on nuttiness. And face it: You don’t cast Béatrice Dalle as a middle-aged (but sensuous as heck) alcoholic mathematician unless you mean business. No wonder John Waters named Domain his number-one movie of 2010.
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The idea of seeing Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton in a movie together, not to mention a movie about a gospel choir, is a particular kind of heaven. Latifah is a radiant performer capable of elevating even the most mundane material to a level of charm and grace unachievable by most mere mortals. And Parton, aside from having one of the sweetest and most haunting voices in all of country music, is a firecracker presence by herself -- if you could bottle force of will in a perfume bottle, you couldn’t name it anything but Dolly. But whatever Latifah and Parton might have achieved together in that mythical heavenly ideal, it’s just not coming together in this lifetime – or at least not in Joyful Noise, a well-intentioned, pleasant-enough picture that shoots off in too many directions to ever ignite.
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If horror movies have taught us anything, it’s that you can lead teenagers to a big red sign that reads “DON’T GO IN THE WOODS,” but you can’t make them not go in the woods anyway. Actor Vincent D’Onofrio nods to this and other slasher clichés in Don’t Go in the Woods, his feature directing debut -- that is, when he’s not nodding to clichés native to the musical and the old “star is born” storyline.
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Tran Anh Hung’s Norwegian Wood is meticulously faithful to the book it’s based on, Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel of the same name: It takes no significant liberties with the plot, and it captures the novel’s delicate, half-hopeful, half-mournful tone. So why, unlike its source material, does it feel only half-alive? It’s so easy, too easy, to get lost in the book-vs.-movie debate. But a movie like Norwegian Wood is a peculiar case – its intentions are sterling, and it’s hard to pinpoint any technical flaws. The problem, maybe, is that it’s trying too hard; Tran has such firm control over the storytelling that the resulting picture has no room to breathe.
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The characters who manned the cameras in The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield weren't pros, providing an excuse for the shakiness and dizzy-making whip pans. Michael (Ionut Grama), the guy who's supposed to be shooting the faux documentary The Devil Inside, is a filmmaker, so the fact that he can't seem to keep anything in focus and frames shots so awkwardly is bewildering. Does this guy actually have a faux filmography, or is this his faux debut? And why does he mount cameras in multiple locations around his subject Isabella Rossi's (Fernanda Andrade) car when he's always with her anyway -- does he imagine himself the Abbas Kiarostami of exorcism exposés?
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John Mellencamp: It’s About You isn’t really about you, or me, or even about John Mellencamp, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who has built an enduring career with his eminently likable, real-person stage demeanor and his songs’ connection with the way regular people live. It’s About You is quite possibly mostly about the filmmaker, Kurt Markus, a commercial photographer who has shot portraits for publications including Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and GQ, as well as ad campaigns for the likes of BMW and Armani.
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Tectonic pacing builds to a series of imperceptible and yet earth-moving moments in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a habeas corpus procedural stretched across two and a half discursive hours. The setup -- a policeman, a lawyer, and a doctor head into the Turkish countryside -- has the ring of an old joke, something Ceylan never forgets as the groups's long night and next day wears on. A mix of mordant wit and metaphysical waxing carries the men toward their respective fates, each having more to do with the buried body they are seeking than it first appears.
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The filmmaking in Iranian director Asghar Farhadi's A Separation is so spare and unfussy that, save for the occasional camera jiggle, you're barely aware of the filmmaking at all. This is a drama about two families -- one deeply religious, one not -- who clash over an escalating series of misunderstandings, and the emotion Farhadi teases out of this increasingly complex situation are unvarnished but restrained. Nothing earth-shattering happens in A Separation, but the straightforwardness of this view of a disintegrating marriage, set in the context of complicated cultural and religious morés, is dramatic by itself.
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Phyllida Lloyd and Meryl Streep work a puny bit of flim-flammery in The Iron Lady: They turn Margaret Thatcher into a folk hero, a woman who, poor lamb, had to make sacrifices in her personal life in exchange for political power. This is a watery, artfully evasive picture, anchored by a stupendous feat of mimicry. Some people call that acting.
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