If you didn’t feel sufficiently suicidal after seeing last week’s South Florida opening of Michael Haneke’s Happy End, writer-director Faith Akin’s medicinal tragedy In the Fade has more than enough blunt despair to finish the job. The difference is that unlike Haneke’s formally precise, even darkly comic burrow into the splintered human condition, Akin’s humorless litany of … [Read more...]
‘Infiltrator’ brings back 1980s drug war, with a Cranston star turn
Diane Kruger and Bryan Cranston in The Infiltrator. Actors are salesmen pushing the products of their characters, and Bryan Cranston, as the saying goes, could sell snow to Eskimos. Disappearing into his roles like a ghost in a fog, he’s arguably the greatest thespian of his generation, which is to say the greatest confidence man, hooking us into believing there’s no one … [Read more...]
Tarantino’s ‘Basterds’ distinctive, but also idiotic
With a regard for history as erratic as his spelling, Quentin Tarantino brings us his idiosyncratic -- and occasionally idiotic -- vision of World War II, Inglourious Basterds, a fitfully amusing, frequently brutal spin on war movie clichés. The title, swiped from an obscure 1978 Italian film, refers to a small group of Jewish-American viligante G.I.s airlifted into … [Read more...]