Word: visual
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...appeal of the premise. To overcome that, the film has to offer something special, going beyond the easy score of referencing classic works of children's literature. Certainly it's a treat to see a Silvertongue bring The Wizard of Oz's Toto to life, or enjoy the visual gag of seeing Capricorn's henchman land in the middle of Kansas, post-tornado. But the internal story, the meta-Inkheart as penned by Fenoglio, never comes into focus; if I were Capricorn, I'd want to escape its tedious pages as well. And if I were Mirren, I'd steer...
...common strategy for beginning to understand big numbers is to devise visual representations. One time, sitting at a baseball game in Philadelphia, Paulos started counting seats along the first-base line. Multiplying the number of seats in a row by the number of rows, Paulos came up with a section of the stadium that he figured contained about 10,000 seats - an image he can now think back to whenever a person starts talking about tens of thousands of a particular thing. When numbers get too large, though, that method breaks down. A stack of one trillion $1 bills would...
...Film Forum, Reygadas shocks again: this drama of a Mennonite community in northern Mexico contains no explicit hanky-panky. In its way, the film is true to the severe, austere code of the Mennonites. Yet it is shot with such care and creativity that each scene has a visual, emotional luster. One critic jokingly called Silent Light the best film ever made in its language - an easy claim to fame, since it is probably the only film in which the characters speak Plautdietsch, the form of Low German used by the sect in Europe, Latin America and Canada. One could...
...this is not merely attention to visual and behavioral detail; it is a consummate film artist's conjuring of a world and its inhabitants. Reygadas elicits strong performances from his amateur cast of Mennonites, whose cowboy hats, plain speaking and ease in inhabiting their sagebrush environment give them the stature of western-movie archetypes. They support the filmmaker's genius for sanctifying each moment: the milking of cows and harvesting of grain, the children being washed in a stream, a rush through a cornfield for a sweetly illicit tryst, the sobbing of a woman in the forest in the rain...
...doesn't just direct his own films, he photographs them (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews). Yet Soderbergh seems defined more by these giant, wayward ambitions than by a discernible authorial personality. If his name were taken off his films, sophisticated viewers would be hard pressed to locate a visual or thematic through-line...