It didn’t surprise me in the slighest to learn, after the fact, that Cypher (2002) is the follow-up film from the director of the original Cube, Vincenzo Natali. They’re similar projects: modestly budgeted, inventive, dark, and plot-driven, films that love toying with and twisting around their clever premises. While Cypher is cold and perhaps a [...]
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Sometimes a film tries to be too many things to too many people. I think The Adjustment Bureau (2011) is one of these films. Like most Hollywood science fiction (or so it seems), this one appropriates a slick Philip K. Dick premise, and it actually executes that premise fairly well. But in its attempts to [...]
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Okay, so this is a weird movie. Tuvalu (1999) is part slapstick silent film, part romantic-comedy, and several parts pretentious arthouse experiment. Filmed in Sofia, Bulgaria (or its crumbling ruins, apparently) by German director Veit Helmer, the film seems to be aiming for the clever charm of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the visually striking style of [...]
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I had high hopes that Terry Gilliam’s latest, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), would be a stirring, brilliant return-to-form. Alas, it is merely a good, fun, crazy romp. But it also, quite satisfyingly, feels like the purest Gilliam vision in a long time, perhaps going back to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen — so [...]
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Much as I hate to say it, Terry Gilliam’s body of work has, in my opinion, steadily degraded since his madly inventive film Brazil came out in 1985. There’s been a lot to like in some of his subsequent films, most notably The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys, but to me he’s never surpassed the [...]
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Night Watch (2004), a dark urban fantasy from Russia, has been half on my radar for a while now, and I finally caught up with it on Netflix. And it’s about damn time…good stuff! As a result of an ancient truce between the powers of light and darkness, there exists, underneath the mundane surface of [...]
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