Word: wit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...contemplating young flesh. Amid the cinematic dross, a jewel emerged: Sylvain Chomet's Les Triplettes de Belleville (Belleville Rendez-Vous). This animated feature, about an old woman who battles the French Mafia to retrieve her kidnapped godson, possessed what other Cannes entries lacked: a vivid visual imagination, a generous wit, an understanding of the human impulse not just to survive but to save others. Dogville may have had the big buzz at Cannes, but Belleville was the great news. Von Trier disappointed his fans by getting shut out at award time. But another Danish auteur did have reason...
...Marlin is not even a fish. He's a computer-generated image attached to a famously fretful voice. But Marlin has all-too-human qualities: insecurity, suspiciousness, giant wrinkles of worry and a lot of saving heart. Endearing flaws like these, along with an unmatched graphic elegance and elfin wit, have made Pixar's first four features--Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.--the gold standard in computer-generated imagination. Gold, as in $1.73 billion worldwide gross for that quartet, plus truckfuls more in video and DVD profits. Pixar owner Steve Jobs will need...
...pastiche of antique moral codes and Populuxe decor. The new film is conflicted about its subject--it both derides and adores what it means to parody--and it's miscast at the top. Still, the Eve Ahlert--Dennis Drake script has a gentle heart to humanize its sharp sitcom wit...
What's this? A philosophical heist movie? Not exactly. Claude Klotz's script for Man on the Train has a wintry wit about it, and the modest incidents that define the two figures toying with transformation have a believable, saving naturalism. Director Patrice Leconte, whose specialty is lonely eccentrics (The Girl on the Bridge, Monsieur Hire), is at his best with these impeccable actors--a noncommittal observer of half-realized dreams and, in this case, the creator of an elegantly polished little film. --By Richard Schickel
...Nine. Playing the mistress of a movie director, she arrives in Act I on a satin-bedsheet swing lowered from the rafters. Flaunting her slim but curvy body and looking like Barbarella in '60s-style layered hair and industrial-strength eye makeup, she gives the show a jolt of wit...