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Toronto 2009: IndieWIRE’s Critics’ Poll

Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man (top); Joel and Ethan Coen (bottom)

Peter Knegt reports that an indieWIRE poll of "more than 25" film critics and bloggers (blogging film critics?) shows that the overwhelmingly favorite film screened at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival was Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man (not to be confused with Tom Ford’s A Single Man or the Michael Douglas vehicle Solitary Man), a black comedy about a suburbanite (Michael Stuhlbarg) whose life suddenly unravels after his wife asks for a divorce. A Serious Man hits US theaters on Oct. 2.

Colin Firth, Julianne Moore in A Single Man

The best performance was delivered by Colin Firth in A Single Man (not to be confused with either [...]

Cannes 2009: Michael Haneke’s THE WHITE RIBBON

 
Dave Calhoun in Time Out London, via David Hudson’s The Daily:
"For quite some time at the beginning of Michael Haneke’s latest film, which is a two-and-a-half hour parable of political and social ideas set entirely in a north German village in 1913 and 1914, you wonder what you’re watching, how its disparate parts hang together and what it all might mean. More than ever, the playful, challenging, sometimes shocking director of Hidden, Funny Games and Time of the Wolf solidly resists answering the ‘what’s it all about?’ question and makes you work hard to make sense of what you’re seeing. As in Code Unknown, he resists focusing on one story or [...]

Cannes 2009: Jane Campion, Alain Resnais, Brillante Mendoza, Johnnie To, Lou Ye

Peter Bradshaw on Bright Star (with Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw, above) in The Guardian:
"Jane Campion has put herself in line for her second Palme d’Or here at the Cannes film festival with a film which I think could be the best of her career; an affecting and deeply considered study of the last years in the short life of John Keats, and the ecstasy of loss which suffuses his love affair with Fanny Brawne – a love thwarted not due to illness, but to a pernicious web of money worries, social scruples and irrelevant male loyalties."
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Maggie Lee on Kinatay in The Hollywood Reporter:
"Festival darling Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay is a long night’s journey into the [...]

Cannes 2009: Ken Loach, Ang Lee, Andrea Arnold, Jacques Audiard

Derek Elley on Looking for Eric (above, Ken Loach and Eric Cantona) in Variety:
"… helmer Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty’s ninth feature together is a curious hybrid: Three movies — boilerplate, socially aware Loach; personal fantasy; romantic comedy — wrap around a central core of a hopeless soccer fanatic who’s given a second chance to sort out his life. As in many of Laverty’s scripts, problems of overall tone and character development aren’t solved by Loach’s easygoing direction, though when it works, Eric has many incidental pleasures."
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Anthony Kaufman on A Prophet at indieWIRE:
"If James Toback’s petty-criminal tale Fingers inspired Jacques Audiard’s previous The Beat That My Heart Skipped, it’s Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas [...]

Cannes 2009: Pedro Almodóvar’s BROKEN EMBRACES

Broken Embraces: Pedro Almodóvar on the set (top); Penélope Cruz as the heroine (bottom).
In the mystery-melodrama, a director and his female star begin a passionate love affair that leads to all sorts of trouble.

Wendy Ide in The [London] Times:
"Certainly, it is unmistakably an Almodovar film. Nobody else does richly-textured melodrama quite like him; nobody else can encourage such overwrought performances without unbalancing the film; nobody else shoots Penélope Cruz with a reverence which borders on fan-worship. But what’s missing here is the warmth and emotional honesty that infuses Almodovar’s most successful features. What’s missing is, arguably, Almodovar himself."
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Eric Kohn in indieWIRE:
"Pedro Almodovar offers nothing new in his [...]

Best Films of 2008: indieWIRE’s Critics’ Poll

The most curious thing about indieWIRE’s 2008 poll of 105 North American film critics is that thus far only six of those critics’ top-ten films have gone on to win awards (film/director/screenplay) from US/Canada critics’ groups.
WALL-E has been the top choice in the animated feature category and was even voted the best film of 2008 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, which, spreading the wealth, also gave Waltz with Bashir their best animated feature prize. Happy-Go-Lucky took best director and best screenplay honors from, respectively, the New York and the Los Angeles critics; Still Life was chosen best foreign-language film in Los Angeles; Synecdoche, New York won a couple of best screenplay awards; while Wendy and Lucy was [...]

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