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4 articles
Darkness Rising
15 July 2009 2:58 PM, PDT
From Bambi's mother's death to the destruction of Alderaan, every modern generation is cursed and blessed with its very own big-screen traumas. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth film in the series based on J.K. Rowling's fantasy novels, contains a doozy; that millions of readers know it's coming won't dim its power in the least. Screenwriter Steve Kloves, director David Yates and the familiar, still-sturdy cast play the grim moment and its aftermath for incredulous shock rather than raw sentiment, knowing viewers will supply the latter in spades.
As devotees know, this entry finds Hogwarts in a funk, its faculty and students still reeling from the death of Harry's godfather and the "I am your father, Luke"-level revelation that the hero is, in fact, The Chosen One. Headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) interrupts Harry's holiday-among-the-common folks (even wand-blocking his flirtation with a star-struck coffee shop waitress) to
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Matt Zoller Seitz
Going the Distance
14 July 2009 6:56 AM, PDT
The only authoritative voice of Israeli filmmaking prior to the recent influx of micro-masterpieces -- let's see if it constitutes a "wave" -- Amos Gitai has had a rocky time of it. He's dared to iron-maiden his audience with hyper-long one-shot sequences and elaborate camera roamings, he's seduced Natalie Portman into doing an Israeli film right after "Closer" and the second "Star Wars" prequel, he's made "Kippur" (2000), an indisputable home run that explored the soldier's experience of the Yom Kippur War. On the other hand, and at the same time, many of his films have been broad, goonish and didactic, and for the most part, his approach toward the Palestinian question has been to not have one. His new film, "One Day You'll Understand," is an all-French probing of the Euro-legacy of the Holocaust, so Gitai has again avoided his own nation's actions in a post-Holocaust world. But it is
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Michael Atkinson
Scrambled Timelines
13 July 2009 11:27 AM, PDT
Shuffling around a story's timeline can make an ordinary tale profound, a potentially exploitative scene moral, a troubling event less so. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at films that have scrambled their own chronology, from Gaspar Noé's infamous "Irréversible" to this week's new release "(500) Days of Summer."
Download: MP3, 37:21 minutes, 34.2 Mb
Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [Xml]
Alison Willmore
Summer, Somers and Potter
13 July 2009 7:04 AM, PDT
Just a couple of blockbusters this week, one of which we've seen most of already. For everybody else, there is a strong selection of international art house pics to go with a couple of homegrown indies.
Download this in audio form (MP3: 9:33 minutes, 13 Mb) Subscribe to the In Theaters podcast: [Xml] [iTunes]
"(500) Days of Summer"
Longtime music video director Marc Webb turned down a lot of horror remakes and teen comedies to make his feature debut with this unconventional recitation of a relationship that doesn't work out. Joseph Gordon-Levitt co-stars as Tom, a poker-faced field mouse rejected by the love of his (comically young) life, the idiosyncratic Summer (Zooey Deschanel), and neurotically dissects the minutia of their courtship as he struggles to figure out what went wrong.
Opens in limited release.
Having spent much time developing functional follow-ups ("Dusk Till Dawn 2," "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights") since helming
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Neil Pedley
4 articles
