A booby-trapped tale of wartime love and guilt, adapted from the great Ian McEwan, who has been mining the darker recesses of desire since First Love, Last Rites (1975). Joe Wright directs an excellent cast — Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave, and newcomer Saoirse Ronan — in what begins like a standard [...]
Lust, Caution
Marcy already reviewed Ang Lee’s latest, so I’ll limit myself to one point: Lust, Caution is continuing evidence that unsimluated sex is making inroads into mainstream films and more traditional styles and genres. Hardcore fucking in serious movies started out, of course, with the French (Romance) and pretentious art movies both domestic (Brown Bunny) and [...]
http://jurgenfauth.com/2007/09/28/lust-caution/
Black Book
When the director of Showgirls, Basic Instinct, and Robocop takes on a story that begins like The Diary of Anne Frank, you can bet your sweet ass that the heroine is going to shoot and screw her way out of trouble until she finally makes it to a kibbutz. Black Book, which did big business [...]
http://jurgenfauth.com/2007/03/02/black-book/
The Third Man
Hadn’t seen this “greatest of foreign noirs” (Bogdanovich) in a good long while, and so I expected the angles and the shadows, Orson and the cuckoo clocks, the Prater and the sewers, the exquisite Graham Greene plotting and cutting repartee, but I had forgotten just how masterfully it all fits together. The German-language bit players [...]
http://jurgenfauth.com/2007/03/01/the-third-man/
The Good Shepherd
Pretty good. Robert De Niro directs a terrific cast in a story that outlines the creation of the CIA from the thirties to the Bay of Pigs, with Matt Damon as stoically loyal spy. Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Billy Crudup, Timothy Hutton, Keir Dullea, Joe Pesci, John Turturro, and Michael Gambon make the [...]
http://jurgenfauth.com/2006/12/06/the-good-shepherd/







