Cinema Mishmash

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Evokes Bergman (and Bresson)?

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My favorite film from the 2009 Chicago International Film Festival, Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother, doesn’t so much defy classification as much as it conglomerates genres in a way that seems as unusual as it is natural. Those who have seen Bong’s 2006 sea monster romp, The Host, will sense an immediate familiarity with Bong’s blending of [...]

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One of the nicest things about a film festival is the surprise delight, if you are bold enough to take a chance on a film and lucky enough for it to pay off. Not that choosing The Girl on the Train as the first film to see at the Chicago International Film Festival was that big [...]

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I’m just going to come out and say it: there isn’t enough going on in Scoop to justify it’s existence to anyone but die hard Woody Allen completists. Admittedly I have a love/hate reaction to Allen’s work. There is no doubt that he is a supremely gifted filmmaker, but Scoop is another example of his [...]

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Behind the scenes of Surveillance sits an underdog story with considerable appeal.  A staggering 15 years passed between Jennifer Lynch’s directorial debut feature, Boxing Helena, and this, her second effort. Despite its patent absurdity, I rather fondly recall Boxing Helena, a film which is perhaps underrated due to its inability to stand up next to the [...]

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I just really can’t reconcile the number of films that have been made which star Nicolas Cage as the mildly vacant character swept up in some sort or frenetic intrigue. If there is any definitive proof that Hollywood is catering to the the least ambitious part of our collective movie consumption, it has to be [...]

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The time travel thriller is no easy nut to crack. On the one hand, you can’t entirely ignore the logical and physical conundrum of what would happen if one person traveled back to a time and place he had already existed. On the other hand, if you try too hard to come up with a [...]

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If the societal revenge flick genre didn’t exist before, it does now with Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a multi-threaded re-imagining in which Hitler and the Nazis get what’s coming a lot sooner than historical truth and, as one would expect from the reining cineaste auteur, with a visual and narrative flourish that no one could [...]

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Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies is a CIA action thriller that hits all of the marks you would expect from an experienced director with two heavyweight actors, Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe (for whom the pun is intended). We’ve seen our fair share of derivative Iraq war fictions, and while this one may have been [...]

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One of the biggest assets that Woody Allen has as a director is his ability to assemble a tremendous array of talent for his pictures. Just about any actor seems to jump at the chance to be able to say he or she was in a Woody Allen picture, and as a result, some of [...]

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Valkyrie tells the true story of Nazi army  Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) and the many men and women who formed an underground resistance movement against Hitler during World War II – from within the German armed forces.  Von Stauffenberg was the key figure in what was one of several attempts to assassinate Hitler, [...]

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Set in Paris during the Nazi occupation, François Truffaut’s The Last Metro tells the story of a the perseverance of a theater owner and her thespian troupe despite the increasing personal and artistic challenges faced by each member. At the center is Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve) an actress who has assumed management of her Jewish husband’s (Heinz [...]

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