
Uncut Gems
It's excruciating and exhilarating.
It's excruciating and exhilarating.
This documentary about a family-owned private ambulance service in Mexico City is one of the great modern films about night in the city.
Roger Ebert on James Ivory's "Howards End".
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An article about the screening of Horace Jenkins' "Cane River" on Friday, November 1st, at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles.
Scout Tafoya's video essay series about maligned masterpieces celebrates Steven Soderbergh's Solaris.
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An FFC on Gavin Hood's Official Secrets.
A celebration of Yasujiro Ozu, as written by a Far Flung Correspondent from Egypt.
An interview with co-writers and co-directors Josh and Benny Safdie about Uncut Gems.
An article about Chicago native Verdine White, and Earth, Wind & Fire receiving the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday, December 8th.
"The Girl From the Naked Eye" opens with a lurid cover from an old pulp detective magazine, and that's the look it achieves. Here's a film noir crossed with a martial-arts movie, taking place in the dark shadows of mean streets. And that's about all you need to know about the plot, which serves simply as a device to keep us moving right along from one bloody action sequence to the next.
It isn't a great movie, but it looks terrific and makes me look forward to the next film by its director, David Ren. He has a good eye. I like his vertiginous high-angle shots looking down into the gray, forbidding caverns between skyscrapers. I like the way he uses the reds and greens on neon signs, isolated in dark settings. I like the offices of nightclubs and mob bosses, where cigars are smoked and threats are made. I like the smoking in general: Some of the characters seem to be smoking at each other as an act of aggression. The dialogue sometimes seems to be deliberately trying for satire, as when two guys go nose to nose and seem to be seeing who can shout the f-word the most.
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It sounds, in fact, as if I like the movie. It was a pleasure to watch, but it never deserved its visuals. The story (which actually could come from one of those old pulps) is narrated in a hard-boiled voiceover by the hero, Jake (Jason Yee), who drives call girls for an escort agency and vows vengeance when his favorite girl, Sandy (Samantha Streets), is gruesomely murdered. His search for the killer leads him into one dangerous situation after another, especially since he seems to have stumbled into a situation where powerful men are not especially thrilled about finding the killer.
The movie is populated with don't-blink cameos, including one by Dominique Swain, Adrian Lyne's "Lolita" (1997) and another by porn star Sasha Grey. The rest of the cast is filled with hard-looking tough guys, more than half of them Asian-American, although no reference to ethnicity is ever made. The movie seems destined for DVD, but it makes a stop this week at three theaters, and would benefit by being seen on a big screen.
A Far Flung Correspondent weighs in on the MCU controversy.
The top 50 shows of the 2010s.
Scout Tafoya's video essay series about maligned masterpieces celebrates Steven Soderbergh's Solaris.
A review of the newest film by Quentin Tarantino.