This past week may have been the most consistently satisfying week of cinema-going since I started this journey with you back in 2006: seven very different films, all with something to offer. And no turkeys this week, so I’ll have to put the acid away until next week. In completely arbitrary order (of viewing in fact), […]
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The romantic comedy is moribund. The first traces of its demise can be dated to the turn of the millenium, when Hugh Grant decided that he didn’t really want to be the floppy-haired object of middle-class women’s affections. Since then, the genre has been a reliable producer of tired and cynical “battles of the sexes” …
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Festival titles are returning to cinemas at such a rate that it seems like pre-Festival cinemagoer cynicism was well-placed. 50% of this week’s new releases were screening locally only a month ago but as they are easily the best half of the arrangement I’m inclined to be forgiving. Armagan Ballantyne’s debut NZ feature The Strength […]
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This week’s Capital Times film review, illustrated and uncut: The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach); Fast Food Nation (Richard Linklater); Friends With Money (Nicole Holofcener); The Grudge 2 (Takashi Shimizu) and Beowulf & Grendel (Sturla Gunnarsson)
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Dan Slevin is a New Zealand-based writer, broadcaster and consultant. He has reviewed cinema for the Capital Times weekly newspaper since September 2006, seeing and reviewing every film commercially released in Wellington in that time (except, for some reason, Flicka or Beverly Hills Chihuahua).
Dan is a regular contributor to Radio New Zealand National’s Nine to Noon programme and produces and co-hosts the weekly movie podcast, Cinematica.
In addition to being the finest swordsman in all France, he is also the meanest hombre west of the Pecos. He tweets here.
Why Funerals & Snakes? In Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris; 1963), Fritz Lang said of CinemaScope: “It’s only good for funerals and snakes.”