Word: director
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ford, the Austin, Texas, fashion designer who for a decade was the creative director at Gucci, financed his first feature himself. The director turned out to be a good investment for the producer. Nuance, not flash, is his forte. Playing to Firth's subtleties, he photographs the actor's handsome, mourning face in caressing close-up. (In his professor glasses, Firth looks like a young, more studious Michael Caine.) Ford is also attentive to the varieties of Southern California sunlight, which lends A Single Man an orangey warmth that should touch all who see the picture. But it's Firth...
Like Bashir director Ari Folman, Maoz served in the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon war; his film is a survivor's haunted memory of that conflict. Except for the opening and closing shots of a field of sunflowers, the entire film takes place in an Israeli tank holding four very nervous soldiers. The only view to the streets outside is through the gunsight aimed at insurgents and civilians. Which ones to shoot at? Which ones to save? Imprisoning the audience with the soldiers may be a gimmick, but it's an inspired one: the viewer wants both to stay inside - shielding them...
...iguana doing on my coffee table?" wonders Nicolas Cage as Lt. Terence McDonagh in this dark, daft, vagrantly intoxicating melodrama. It's a sequel of sorts to Abel Ferrara's 1992 Bad Lieutenant, which starred Harvey Keitel as a nameless, coke-addled sadist who has visions of Jesus. Director Werner Herzog - who made great movies in the '70s, and whose oneiric documentaries landed him on this year's TIME 100 list - says he never saw the Ferrara film, and simply worked from a script by William Finkelstein, who's written more than 100 episodes of cop shows (Law & Order, NYPD...
Tone is all in a social fable, and first-time writer-director Derrick Borte shows an impressive command of mood and pace. He doesn't push your face into the message of conspicuous consumerism; he lets the characters and actors breathe, allows viewers to detect the toxic undertaste in their own good time. In its amiable, ambling way, The Joneses is a zeitgeist film: it says as much as a Michael Moore screed about the American way of debt. It's also a feature-long joke about Hollywood's mania for product placement...
...Taliban fighters. The Kandahar office says it now operates with a budget of $700 a month and has only reeled in 537 disaffected Taliban in nearly two years. "We can only offer them $20 for their weapon. They can get far more than that in the bazaar," says Kandahar director Haji Agha Lalai. "We should be able to give them a job, rent money, but we can't." This paltry offering cannot compete with the wages and benefits that a Taliban fighter collects from his commanders who, Afghan officials allege, are bankrolled by Pakistani intelligence services covertly helping the Taliban...