Time once again for saluting the year's Ten Best movies. Although 2006 brought a handful of terrific films, overall it seemed an off year for cinema: more movies than ever, but few that registered strongly. Those that did are remembered here.
Angry grannies, Sleeping Beauty and a soulful totThree fables of females from this year's Vancouver International Film Festival, considered by Kathleen Murphy
Kathleen Murphy: "Who is Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.? Probably you've never heard of this Dutch helmer, and judging by The Thing, his debut film, that's not likely to change anytime soon. Saddled with 'prequeling' John Carpenter's 1982 classic, and supremely short on originality, van Heijningen Jr. and company simply rework the bare-bones template—shape-shifting alien stalking a scientific team in Antarctica—while relying on a CG-improved monster to up the terror ante. The malformed result is a subpar slasher movie tricked out with tired Ten Little Indians tropes and rip-offs from both Carpenter and the Christian Nyby–Howard Hawks 1951 version of the chilling tale that started it all, John W. Campbell Jr.'s 'Who Goes There?'" Go there at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/the-thing.5/#Review_0Though there's more here, too......
October 21 will bring the umpteenth-to-the-n-power film version of the Alexandre Dumas tale The Three Musketeers. Exalted expectations are not encouraged by the directorial presence of Paul W.S. Anderson—he of Mortal Kombat/Resident Evil notoriety (as opposed to Paul Thomas Hard Eight/Boogie Nights/There Will Be Blood Anderson)—nor by the casting of the titular swashbucklers and their new pal d'Artagnan (though I have a soft spot for Ray Stevenson, who plays Porthos—we named our favorite cat after his character in the HBO series Rome). On the other haft, we hope to savor Mads Mikkelsen as Rochefort and Christoph Waltz as Richelieu; and there's a certain inevitability in the resident evil, Milady de Winter, being incarnated by Milla Jovovich. Bonne chance to them all, and merci, because their film's release cues me to haul out my commentaries on the grandest of all movie Musketeers, the ones—or the one?—made by Richard Lester in 1973 and released in America in 1974 and 1975. The two reviews appeared in the Seattle Film Society magazine Movietone News.
I was having a postprandial Hearts game with friends one Saturday evening in spring 1977 when the Arts & Entertainment editor of what was then called The Weekly phoned: would I please scurry over to the Cinerama for the sneak preview of the new Woody Allen picture? I was not a member of the Woodman's fan club as far as his filmmaking career to date was concerned, but that view was about to be adjusted. With Annie Hall set to play twice during the current reopening-of-the-Uptown festivities—at 8 p.m. Monday, Oct. 24 and 5 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 25—I'm posting the result of that 1977 expedition. —RTJ
As we embarked on our annual November-December process of catching up with the myriad films missed in the course of the year and zeroing in on our notions of the best, Kathleen Murphy remarked that 2007 hadn't been a year for great films. No, I agreed, only one or two seemed worthy of deeming great (an adjective we take pretty seriously), but there had been a healthy crop of really good, smart, ambitious movies that lingered in the mind. And in its way, that was almost as gratifying, and maybe more reassuring, than half a dozen masterpieces.
Although I continued to write the occasional film piece for Queen Anne & Magnolia News after vacating the editor's chair at the end of 2007, I didn't propose doing Ten Best pieces for the next two years. So just to fill an apparent gap here......
To afford perspective on the 2010 Academy Awards contest, we flash back to anticipatory articles on other races the previous three years.
Curtis Hanson's 1997 film of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential will be shown twice during the ongoing Uptown-reopening celebration, at 9 p.m. Monday, Oct. 24 and again at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26. Here's what I said about it at the time of its release. The venue was the better-than-the-name-suggests website Mr. Showbiz. —RTJ
AFI grad Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala can't help but make art movie aficionados swoon—and Hollywood sit up and take notice. Might there be just a whiff of opportunism, aesthetic and thematic, in this pedal-to-the-metal thriller about the victimization of a young and beautiful woman (Stephanie Sigman) inadvertently swept into the bloody war among Mexican drug cartels, the DEA, cops, and maybe even the military? One writer may have exposed the little worm in the apple of so many critical eyes: "Were it not for the pervasive horror of the real-life combat, Miss Bala might have seemed absurdly lurid, unduly noir."
Nominations for the 83rd Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards were announced Jan. 25 ... but is the race already over?
A couple of years ago, U.S. audiences were riveted by Red Riding Trilogy, a production for Britain's Channel Four exploring a history of crime, of both the organized and the darkly obsessive varieties, twisting its way through a community in the North of England over the span of a decade. The trilogy was a unified work pursuing a narrative involving a teeming cast of characters, yet each of the three feature-length components was handled by a different director, and each director took his own, quite distinct stylistic approach to his part of the saga. Much the same is true for Dreileben, a 2011 triptych for German television that played this year's Vancouver International Film Festival......
Ho-ho-ho or "Bah, humbug"? Kathleen Murphy unwraps the holiday movie presents at http://movies.msn.com/movie-guide-winter/intro/
Toward the end of last year, a friend and I were e-mailing about Clint Eastwood's Hereafter. Released in mid-October, the film, a meditative journey along the boundary between life and death, had already done a fast fade as a commercial prospect (death is such a downer) and subject for awards speculation. My friend disdains Eastwood's filmmaking as much as I mostly esteem it, but he agreed with me about one thing: he was "blown away" by Matt Damon's performance. I said I thought it was the best of the year but feared it would be ignored come Oscar season. Not only was Damon's character one among several focal figures in a film with several story threads—"He doesn't speak with a British accent, and he doesn't stammer." OK, that was glib. But also on point and, as a prediction, accurate. Damon wasn't among the Academy Award nominees announced the morning of January 25. He rarely has been (Good Will Hunting, 1997; Invictus, 2009). Yet Matt Damon may be the best actor in movies these days, even if that superlative usually cues people to envision such worthies as Javier Bardem or Jeff Bridges or Johnny Depp. Damon has long since earned a place in their company, but neither he nor his work insists on it—as he doesn't insist on his stardom. He's mingled stellar turns in the likes of The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Departed and the Bourne franchise with supporting and ensemble roles: Saving Private Ryan, Dogma, Syriana, the Ocean's pictures, Invictus. That's better than being the best actor. He's the exemplary actor. Find the rest at http://movies.msn.com/academy-awards/matt-damon-acting-for-oscar/
Kathleen Murphy makes a happy discovery: Arthur Christmas, a "bright, shiny yuletide gift from Aardman Animation (Wallace & Gromit), is a joy for the eye, mind and heart—not to mention funny bone. Opening with a breathtaking sky ride through rolling, snow-covered hills in Cornwall to zero in on the little village of Trelew, it grabs you up and never lets go. Its 3-D visuals are often dizzying and genuinely magical; you never feel as though you're being beaten about the head with 'special' effects that insist on being registered and admired. Everything you see in Arthur Christmas is fashioned in the service of telling a story ... brilliantly." Catch more of the ride at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/arthur-christmas.1/#Review_0