Film review – Page 15

2006 Top Ten: Older Films

December 31, 2006 Doug Cummings Commentary, Film review

Top ten lists for new releases are sometimes a nice barometer of the state of the art, but often I’m much more interested in lists of older films. Aside from the obvious reasons (dude, the cinema’s over a hundred years old!), they’re usually comprised of better movies that are also more readily available on DVD, so they’re more useful as viewing guides. Secondly, they tell me what films are contributing to a critic’s (in the loosest sense of the word) current perceptions and judgments (or if they’re contributing at all). And finally, I simply spend a lot more time each …

2006 Top Ten

December 29, 2006 Doug Cummings Commentary, Film review

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

Drawing up a list of favorite films each year can be a lengthy but illuminating task, especially for those of us lucky and/or obsessed enough to watch a lot of good movies; on a list of ten, one can easily spend more time deciding which films to exclude than include. This year was no exception; between large festivals and small ones, limited engagements, and wide releases, I spent innumerable hours immersed in fantastic cinema in 2006. But it deserves mentioning that Los Angeles remains by and large an industry town, and despite the efforts of …

The Road to Guantanamo

June 22, 2006 Doug Cummings Film review

Given the kneejerk partisan response to An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s informative documentary about the realities of global warming, I have little expectation that Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ new visceral docudrama about human rights abuses in US prison camps will provide a wake-up call to the dwindling numbers of internment policy loyalists–but one can always dream.

The Road to Guantanamo (winner of the best directing award at the Berlin Film Festival) comes to US screens at a time when the mainstream media has rediscovered the prisons in Cuba used for people captured in the war on terror: imprisoned …

Arthur Lipsett, 21-87

June 14, 2006 Doug Cummings Film review

Several weeks ago, I managed to see Arthur Lipsett’s astonishing collage film, 21-87 (1964), in Toronto at the NFB Mediatheque, but I postponed writing more in-depth about it until I could obtain a copy on video. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that it isn’t available for individual purchase, even though the NFB offers DVDs of A Trip Down Memory Lane (1965) and Very Nice, Very Nice (1961), the film that earned Lipsett an Academy Award nomination and an invitation by Stanley Kubrick to create the title sequence for Dr. Strangelove. (He declined.)

21-87 is a particularly hard film to write about …

Buffalo Boy and Oxhide

June 5, 2006 Doug Cummings Film review

I’ve recently seen two significant films from Asia, Ming Nguyen-Vo’s Buffalo Boy (Vietnam, 2004) and Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide (China, 2005). While their details differ, similarities abound: both films are feature debuts by their respective filmmakers; both explore the impact of family trades (involving cattle) on the individuals that comprise them; and both are set in specific locales recorded in striking, elliptical ways. And both are available on DVD–Buffalo Boy was released in North America a few weeks ago; Oxhide should be out (with English subtitles?) from MK2’s CinÈma DÈcouverte in France, but it looks as if it might’ve …

Nathaniel Dorsky

May 2, 2006 Doug Cummings Film review

Threnody…

Last night, the REDCAT screened some works by avant-garde filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky (who was in attendance), and my own pre-show experience set the tone. Hopping out of the downtown Los Angeles subway near dusk, I was only one of a handful of pedestrians walking up the steep hill on 1st Street; suddenly thousands of immigrants began pouring over the crest of the hill a few blocks away, parading joyously past me with flags waving in an endless stream of solidarity. It was an impressive moment, and not unlike the experience of watching a Dorsky film: a heretofore obscure or …