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How would you respond if you came home to find illegal immigrants living in your apartment?
In The Visitor, that’s the big surprise that changes the life of Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins). When Walter, an economics professor from Connecticut, visits New York for a conference on developing nations, he returns to his long-neglected apartment only to discover two illegal immigrants living there.
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Untitled, Cameron Crowe’s personal cut of last year’s hit film Almost Famous, just arrived on DVD. It’s definitely an improvement on the original, offering characters that are more fully developed and scenes that give the film’s conclusion far more resonance. It was my favorite American movie of 2000.
Crowe also has a new film in theatres, and it’s a very different affair. After building a reputation on edgy romantic comedies, this time he’s trying his hand at a mind-bending thriller.
a review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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Mira Nair’s film adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair is complicated by two simple problems.
One: It tries to cram far too much story into 141-minutes. We barely get acquainted with a crowd of characters and a context, and then we’re rushed ahead through time to a different place, a different crowd of characters, and a whole new set of melodramatic crises. Thus we eventually quit trying to get our bearings and we just watch, increasingly detached, wondering what catastrophe will happen next.
Two: The storytellers can’t decide whether we should sympathize with the heroine or cheer for her clever, manipulative, sometimes ruthless endeavors to gain status, position, and wealth. Is she a heroine at all? Should we be aghast at her heartless behavior… or should we pity her and blame her circumstances for her wrongdoing?
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Tran Anh Hung, director of The Scent of Green Papaya, seems to use a story as an excuse to film natural beauty. His latest, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, is no exception.
Vertical Ray tells the stories, actually chapters from the stories, of three sisters in Hanoi and their different experiences in love and loss. Two are married – Suong and Kanh – and the youngest, Lien, is still dating. For the first hour of the film, we bask in the joys of their seemingly simple, tradition-rich life. The movie is bookended by annual memorial dinners in memory of their departed mother. We watch them prepare and we join them for the festivities. Sunlight floods through windows, giving everything a dreamy, summery look. You’ll feel like eating, and then you’ll feel like taking a nap.
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Wide Awake. The Sixth Sense. Unbreakable. Signs. And now… The Village.
Every film made by M. Night Shyamalan belongs to a different genre. While Shyamalan’s style is distinct and recognizable—the moody cinematography, the love of Hitchcock-esque surprise, the love of close-ups—still, each has its own distinct storytelling style. The titles occupy very different places on the spectrum between stark realism and simplistic morality play.
Unfortunately, many critics and moviegoers fail to take this into account when reviewing his films. They want to compare and contrast each film as if it takes place in the same universe, the same genre, as the last. Thus, they fail to fully appreciate Shyamalan’s range and strengths. They are so busy analyzing him as a “twist-ending” storyteller that they overlook the sheer audacity of his vision, the bold and often successful risks he takes.