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ZacharyWigon
Review of Tell No One
Tell No One Transcends Its Genre NarrativeTell No One Transcends Its Genre Narrative Tell No One, Guillame Canet's adaptation of American novelist Harlan Coben's drug-store paperback, is a telling example of what Jean-Luc Godard once said in regard to his film Contempt: "The best novels to adapt are not the classics, but the paperbacks to ... read more Posted on 04/27/2008 by ZacharyWigon 
Review of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Mungiu's "Abortion" Drama Is A High-Water Mark Of The Romanian New WaveIt's no illusion that the Romanian film world has been thriving as of late. Two years ago, The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu was brought to New York and opened to significant critical acclaim. This past year marked the release of 12:08 East Of Bucharest, another Romanian film that was well ... read morePosted on 01/10/2008 by ZacharyWigon 
Review of Honeydripper
Sayles soaks his paean to the blues in Southern mythologyThe blind guitar player. The runaway train-hopper. The drunken knife fight. The last chance at saving the establishment. They're all elements of folklore and mythology, be it Southern blues mythology (the first three) or cinematic mythology (the last one). How many films have we seen where a proprietor is told ... read morePosted on 12/30/2007 by ZacharyWigon 
Review of Persepolis
The Political As Personal, The Personal As PoliticalAs evidenced by the recent slate of disastrously incompetent political films Americans have been subjected to recently (Lions For Lambs, Redacted, In The Valley Of Elah, et cetera), to make a film that combines the political with the personal is no easy task. It's a predicament that constantly pushes art ... read morePosted on 12/27/2007 by ZacharyWigon 
Review of Great Debaters
Washington's Second Pic As Helmer Misfires GreatlyDenzel Washington is one of those actors (we call them stars) who is a performative relative of the director-as-auteur; that is to say, his performances are continually self-referential and share common traits. Denzel Washington doesn't play characters; he plays himself. The Great Debaters, the second film that he has directed, ... read morePosted on 12/16/2007 by ZacharyWigon 
Review of Music Within
Feel-good biopic fails to reach beyond the level of facile sentimentalityThere’s something to be said for formulas. When formulas work, they work. This goes without saying in the realm of science. In the realm of art, the success or failure of a formula is given a bit more variability. One wants to follow the formula closely enough that its past ... read morePosted on 10/16/2007 by ZacharyWigon 
Review of Klimt
Raul Ruiz's excessively expressionistic film just winds up a jumbled messIt’s hardly original to point out that, in works of art, the division between form and content is a porous one. There are numerous films – many of them excellent – wherein the style and formal choices made exert a strong influence on how the narrative, characters and ideas in ... read morePosted on 10/16/2007 by ZacharyWigon |
