First, a quick reminder that entries on several films playing here or there have been updated through today: Film Socialisme, Agrarian Utopia, Road to Nowhere and The Tree of Life. Alright, on with the weekend...
"Jj Abrams imitates to flatter with Super 8, an homage to the seminal science fiction films of Steven Spielberg that succumbs to empty nostalgic pandering," argues Nick Schager in Slant. "As with his Star Trek, Abrams's latest puts a modern spin on classical material, though here reinvention isn't the goal so much as slavish duplication embellished with muscular CG effects. It's akin to returning to a cinematic womb of Spielbergian father-son issues, suburban households under extraterrestrial strain, and teen romance, friendship, and maturation via out-of-this-world circumstances. The effect of such a modus operandi is initial coziness quickly giving way to disheartening familiarity, with Abrams's own preoccupations (if he had any to begin with) becoming subsumed beneath the root themes,...
"Jj Abrams imitates to flatter with Super 8, an homage to the seminal science fiction films of Steven Spielberg that succumbs to empty nostalgic pandering," argues Nick Schager in Slant. "As with his Star Trek, Abrams's latest puts a modern spin on classical material, though here reinvention isn't the goal so much as slavish duplication embellished with muscular CG effects. It's akin to returning to a cinematic womb of Spielbergian father-son issues, suburban households under extraterrestrial strain, and teen romance, friendship, and maturation via out-of-this-world circumstances. The effect of such a modus operandi is initial coziness quickly giving way to disheartening familiarity, with Abrams's own preoccupations (if he had any to begin with) becoming subsumed beneath the root themes,...
- 6/12/2011
- MUBI
This gripping, profoundly mysterious movie is an uncanny drama of family dysfunction, says Peter Bradshaw
Carlos Saura's 1976 film Cría Cuervos, or Raise Ravens, is now revived as part of the BFI Southbank season of post-Franco Spanish cinema, and it is a sensational rerelease: a gripping, profoundly mysterious movie which is both an uncanny drama of family dysfunction and a historical parable of the end of Franco-ism: a film which fully deserves to be placed alongside Bergman's Cries and Whispers or Fanny and Alexander. Eight-year-old Ana Torrent (from Víctor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive) plays Ana, whose father is a senior Spanish army officer and brutal generalissimo stalwart. One night, Ana witnesses this man expiring from a heart attack while having sex with the wife of his best friend: his own wife, Ana's mother, has already died after a long illness and years of mistreatment. Ana fantasises that she has murdered her father,...
Carlos Saura's 1976 film Cría Cuervos, or Raise Ravens, is now revived as part of the BFI Southbank season of post-Franco Spanish cinema, and it is a sensational rerelease: a gripping, profoundly mysterious movie which is both an uncanny drama of family dysfunction and a historical parable of the end of Franco-ism: a film which fully deserves to be placed alongside Bergman's Cries and Whispers or Fanny and Alexander. Eight-year-old Ana Torrent (from Víctor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive) plays Ana, whose father is a senior Spanish army officer and brutal generalissimo stalwart. One night, Ana witnesses this man expiring from a heart attack while having sex with the wife of his best friend: his own wife, Ana's mother, has already died after a long illness and years of mistreatment. Ana fantasises that she has murdered her father,...
- 6/9/2011
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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