items tagged with Amelie

A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT

Its love scenes are like Titanic meets The English Patient, its battle scenes suggest what might happen if the Coen brothers remade Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and yet A Very Long Engagement is enormously enjoyable; this mad amalgam of genres and styles seems almost tailor-made for the talents of its director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

UNFAITHFUL

Diane Lane has been a terrific performer for close to 25 years without really becoming a star, yet that’s destined to change with Unfaithful, the hypnotic new Adrian Lyne thriller that gives Ms. Lane the chance to show, when granted the right material, how incredibly fine she can be.

WE WERE SOLDIERS

We Were Soldiers is, in many ways, the oddest war movie I’ve ever seen. It’s set during the Ia Drang battle of the Vietnam War, but it’s performed and directed with such resolute patriotism and heroism that it feels like a product of World War II, or rather, movies about World War II.

I AM SAM

How does one begin to discuss the blinding idiocies of I Am Sam? This comic weepie about Sam (Sean Penn), a mentally challenged Starbucks employee trying to retain custody of his young daughter Lucy (Dakota Fanning), is so shockingly offensive, both thematically and as a work of cinema, as to defy rational analysis, so here’s a brief checklist of what made me want to bash my head in: