home • film hq --> 5 Star Films

Comments: This is right up there with Michael Haneke's Funny Games in the twisted creepy department. There's a surreal normalcy that pervades the proceedings even when they get completely bent. Something about the story though, after it is fully revealed, might take a little bit of the air out of your tires. You've seen it before and you'll see it again, but so what?

This film is anything but predictable as you're being dragged through it. I'd wager an episode of Dallas that it isn't until after the final denouement that you'll feel like you knew where things had the possibility of going. If the ending does disappoint, it's because the entirety of everything that preceded it has you expecting more. Good films do that. Good films are like roller coasters: you can know where they start and where they end, and many of them are alike, but that doesn't prevent you from jumping on and enjoying a ride. Naboer is a well put together film with greasy, seductive characters, a thoughtfully subtle soundtrack, and an eerie set, the girls' apartment, that grows throughout the film mirroring the expanding recesses of their mind fuck.

By now, if you've heard of this film you've heard about the sex scene (I guess you'd call it a sex scene) where a man and woman bloody one another by sprinkling their lustful moves with punches to the face. If you haven't, now you have.

Part of the intrigue of watching foreign films comes from the fact that they usually employ foreign actors. Duh. The visual cues to their personality makeup are different. This guy, Kristoffer Joner, who plays the seeming innocent, his face, his body language, they're confused yet curious dread personified. The girls, they're some kind of sleazy, sexy, creepy crawly mash-up teetering between repulsive and titillating. This might be a genre piece with a story arc you've seen before but I'll bet you've never seen it played like these players play it.

•••

Summary: A psychological thriller, where the main character, John (Kristoffer Joner), have recently been dumped by his girlfriend, Ingrid. He is seduced by his beautiful neighbors, Anne and Kim, and is taken to a mystical and frightful world where he isn't able to tell reality from fantasy.

Details [+/-]       Back to top

Comments: There Are No Clean Getaways

And I don't think there was a single misstep in this film. Javier Bardem is one of the creepiest bad guys to come along in a long time. His downright silly haircut adds to it. The man lives outside the bounds. It's hard to imagine someone so evil. And it's a great morality play without .... uh ... I dunno.

Summary: In rural Texas, welder and hunter Llewelyn Moss discovers the remains of several drug runners who have all killed each other in an exchange gone violently wrong. Rather than report the discovery to the police, Moss decides to simply take the two million dollars present for himself. This puts the psychopathic killer, Anton Chigurh, on his trail as he dispassionately murders nearly every rival, bystander and even employer in his pursuit of his quarry and the money. As Moss desperately attempts to keep one step ahead, the blood from this hunt begins to flow behind him with relentlessly growing intensity as Chigurh closes in. Meanwhile, the laconic Sherrif Ed Tom Bell blithely oversees the investigation even as he struggles to face the sheer enormity of the crimes he is attempting to thwart.

Details [+/-]       Back to top

Comments: If you smoke or eat meat you shouuld enjoy Denis Leary's intimidating sense of humor.

Summary: Politics aside, if you ever had wood paneling at home or slid across the bench seat of a station wagon, his riff on growing-up in a working-class family hits home.

At his brutal best, Leary froths at the mouth as he paces the stage, getting more and more worked-up about the daily inanities we all suffer daily.

Details [+/-]       Back to top

Comments: The family that eats together stays together.

This is probably the closest I'll get to calling a film poetry but you probably won't. Sono has such a delicate touch with sound. It is vital to the presentation.

Summary: A teenager called Noriko Shimabara runs away from her family in Tokoyama, to meet Kumiko, the leader of an Internet BBS, Haikyo.com. She becomes involved with Kumiko's "family circle", which grows darker after the mass suicide of 54 high school girls.

Details [+/-]       Back to top

Comments: A 3000 MILE CHASE . . . That blazes a trail of TERROR to a gripping, spine-chilling climax !

Summary: A strong candidate for the most sheerly entertaining and enjoyable movie ever made by a Hollywood studio (with Citizen Kane, Only Angels Have Wings and Trouble in Paradise running neck and neck). Positioned between the much heavier and more profoundly disturbing Vertigo (1958) and the stark horror of Psycho (1960), North by Northwest (1959) is Alfred Hitchcock at his most effervescent in a romantic comedy-thriller that also features one of the definitive Cary Grant performances. Which is not to say that this is just "Hitchcock Lite"; seminal Hitchcock critic Robin Wood (in his book Hitchcock's Films Revisited) makes an airtight case for this glossy MGM production as one of The Master's "unbroken series of masterpieces from Vertigo to Marnie." It's a classic Hitchcock Wrong Man scenario: Grant is Roger O. Thornhill (initials ROT), an advertising executive who is mistaken by enemy spies for a U.S. undercover agent named George Kaplan. Convinced these sinister fellows (James Mason as the boss, and Martin Landau as his henchman) are trying to kill him, Roger flees and meets a sexy Stranger on a Train (Eva Marie Saint), with whom he engages in one of the longest, most convolutedly choreographed kisses in screen history. And, of course, there are the famous set pieces: the stabbing at the United Nations, the crop-duster plane attack in the cornfield (where a pedestrian has no place to hide), and the cliffhanger finale atop the stone faces of Mount Rushmore. Plus a sparkling Ernest Lehman script and that pulse-quickening Bernard Herrmann score. What more could a moviegoer possibly desire? --Jim Emerson

Details [+/-]       Back to top