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Review | Crap Artist: Robert Celestino's "Yonkers Joe"
7 January 2009 10:05 AM, PST
by Leo Goldsmith (January 7, 2009) [An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]
From the start, "Yonkers Joe" pitches the spectator directly into a world of tough-talking gamblers and sharks, where the dice are loaded, hands move quickly, and there's always a scam in the offing. This milieu of casinos and parking lots, peopled with hustlers and hookers, is a familiar film setting, but one that's produced remarkably few good films. Though the subject at hand seems ideally suited to cinema, allowing for a closer look at all the sleights and feints of card-sharp's or crap-shooter's trade, films such as "Hard Eight," "Shade," "The Cooler," and this year's "21" all mine similar material with a range of mostly disappointing results.
peter
Review | Magic Hour: Carlos Reygadas's "Silent Light"
6 January 2009 1:24 PM, PST
by Kristi Mitsuda (January 6, 2009) [An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]
Carlos Reygadas's visceral cinematic sensibility can be felt in every frame of "Silent Light," briefly showcased at New York's MoMA last fall and already cropping up on numerous critical year-end lists (mine included). It receives wider U.S. exposure starting this week at Gotham's Film Forum, thankfully: As with all of the Mexican filmmaker's works, it demands to be seen on the big screen; only an immersive theatrical setting can do justice to such complex visual and aural textures, painstakingly planned camera movements, and sensitivity to light. This holds particularly true in the case of "Silent Light," in which Reygadas tames his more bravura instincts, as rapturously beheld in "Japon" and "Battle in Heaven," resulting in a film no less gorgeous, but more delicate in its beauty.
brian
Reverse Shot's Best of 2008: "Flight of the Red Balloon" and 9 more
5 January 2009 12:49 PM, PST
by Leo Goldsmith, Eric Hynes, Michael Koresky, Kristi Mitsuda, Jeff Reichert, Sarah Silver, Andrew Tracy, Elbert Ventura, Chris Wisniewski, and Genevieve Yue (January 5, 2009) An acclaimed Taiwanese filmmaker working in France; a young Mexican director reimagining a canonical Danish film in an obscure Mennonite community in his home country; a West Coast-based American, enamored of the somber rhythms of the blasted Mississippi delta, miraculously captures them in the kind of American independent film all too rare of late; others from around the globe watching the specificities of home --character, geography, community, and class -- evaporate around them. These were the stories of our cinematic 2008, and we'd be hard-pressed to draw any solid conclusions from them, except that passion for those few terrific films that deserve attention always lives, even in those movie years considered less than stellar. Hou Hsiao-hisen's "Flight of the Red Balloon," it should be noted, was the clear winner,
(more)
eug
Review | The Bad German: Vicente Amorim's "Good"
4 January 2009 4:17 PM, PST
by Leo Goldsmith (January 4, 2009) [An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]
Midway through Austro-Brazilian director Vicente Amorim's fascist parable "Good," as student radicals burn books in his university's courtyard, Professor John Halder half-jokingly scoffs at his own literary ambitions, fearing that his novel-writing effort is merely "adding to the pile." Halder, a professor of literature in 1930s Germany, can't so much as get through a Proust lecture without the interruption of loud Nazi rallies outside the classroom (or indeed censures from the dean for teaching a Frenchman).
brian
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