“Masculinity in Mann’s world is its own prison, a conundrum of duality, a question of what someone will stand for and the masks they may wear while striving for an identity.”
Joey Keogh on the 20th Anniversary of ‘The Fast and the Furious’
“Beautifully shot, wildly inventive and devilishly unpredictable – and with a swooning, dead-cool soundtrack to match – ‘Sexy Beast’ is well worth celebrating on its 20th anniversary.”
Mannhunting #3 by Bill Bria (‘Ali,’ ‘The Insider’ and ‘Collateral’)
The Art of the Score #1: Blake Howard on David Mamet’s ‘Heist’
“Seidl has produced many scenes of lengthy sexual humiliation or nasty perversion, but they are stories of the world that are drawn from the horrible truth of human behaviour.”
“‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ is heartbreaking and life-affirming in equal measure, which is a difficult balance to pull off, particularly in a movie that frequently treats its protagonist quite harshly.”
“‘Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi’ bears the unmistakable stamp of an artist at the very apogee of his creative prowess.”
“Looking back on early-2000s fare, ‘Get Over It’ stands out as smarter, sweeter, funnier and weirder than many of its contemporaries…”
“Pedro Almodóvar adores women, and he’s a champion of feminism. In no other film is the Spanish filmmaker’s reverence for the female gender more evident than in the 2006 drama ‘Volver.'”
“‘Southland Tales’ and ‘Kaboom’ aren’t defined BY their end-of-days narratives, as their apocalypses define the contents through the fulfillment of apocalyptic revelations.”
“‘The Black Dahlia’ shows De Palma in a reflective mood, considering the impact cinema, especially his own, has had on the lives and suffering of women on screen.”
“The six major theatrical adaptations of Phantom’s story cover a wide realm of romantic horror, fully exploiting the themes and concepts within the character.”
“The accumulated effect of ‘Find Me Guilty,’ with its litany of absurdities, is that it is better to deliver the accused from continued subjugation than to maintain faith in a system that has lost all claim to its moral authority.”
“‘Yi Yi’ is a film for grown ups in the sense that the characters have lived long enough to understand how memories of people can stay with them over the course of their lives. Keeping your distance from people is not the same as giving up on them.”
“Abstract and disjointed, the narrative of ‘Mysterious Object at Noon’ is progressively piecemeal, and what occurs in ‘Limite’ is even more inconclusive.”
“In the cinema of Michael Mann, romance comes fast or not at all, often smothered by the anonymous network of mankind itself or maybe just your job.”
“What allows Cattet and Forzani’s films to flourish is that they modify cinematic influences to accommodate today’s instant gratification culture.”
“By experiencing Almodóvar’s films as the product of a man whose view of the world is deeply affected by a variety of nagging medical concerns, only a few late period works thoroughly scratch under the surface of his psyche.”
“No matter what one pulls from Kon’s work, there’s no denying his lasting impact and innate ability to immediately render a viewer speechless.”