All posts by Jesse Cataldo »
They Call it Myanmar
The second most remote country in the world, Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, remains largely cloaked in silence, with scarce hints of modern poverty and ancient beauty managing to peek through. Plunged into turmoil
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Film After Film: by J. Hoberman
Booted from his senior critic position at The Village Voice after 33 years, J. Hoberman has become one of the figureheads for the continuing collapse of paid film journalism, in a world that’s moving
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Chicken with Plums
Once again dipping into her family history for inspiration, Marjane Satrapi draws the thread much further in Chicken with Plums, transforming a great uncle’s mysterious demise into a near-mythical story of lovelorn resignation. Distraught
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Rediscover: And Everything is Going Fine
Rediscover is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that have flown under the radar and now deserve a second look. The subjects of Steven Soderbergh’s recent films – a guerrilla, a corrupt executive,
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2 Days in New York
Amid another summer defined by the helter skelter march of monstrous franchises and unnecessary remakes comes the rare sequel that actually seems somewhat warranted. The latest step in her quest to become the female
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Killer Joe
Sordid and sweaty, William Friedkin’s Killer Joe earns its NC-17 rating, not just through profuse violence but the swelteringly nasty environment it cultivates. Set in a blistering Texas trailer park, the film concerns a
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In Broad Daylight: by Gabriele Pedulla
My recent viewing of the new Batman movie kicked off with a pre-film plea from Regal Theaters, a snappy little ad reminding us of the sanctity of the Cineplex, equating watching a film on
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Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
Although it lacks the latter’s epic scope, Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri functions as the samurai equivalent to his The Human Condition war trilogy, an ostensible genre exercise that deconstructs the prevailing notions of that genre,
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Trishna
An eclectic director with a fundamentally loose style, Michael Winterbottom dabbles in a wide variety of genres, but his fixations remain rigid, continually returning to the same themes, and the same mistakes. This is
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