More Slant.

"Zhang Yimou moves ever closer to grand opera with Curse of the Golden Flower, though this garish familial melodrama-cum-action extravaganza plays better in retrospect than it does in the moment," Keith Uhlich for Slant. More from Nick Schager at his own site.

Back to Keith Uhlich: "I intend on seeing Children of Men again purely to bask in the glories of a perfectly tuned machine. But a machine it remains..." And he also picks up Slant's coverage of the Jacques Rivette retro at the Museum of the Moving Image, but really cuts loose at the House Next Door.

Nick Schager: "From its class warfare premise to the presence of Juliette Binoche, Breaking and Entering plays out like a softer, more cuddly version of Michael Haneke's Caché, confronting issues of race, equality, guilt, voyeurism, and violence not with Haneke's hectoring tone but, instead, director Anthony Minghella's calculated optimism."

Also: "The continued refusal to recognize the 1915 Armenian genocide by Turkey - as well as the US and UK - constitutes an unjust denial of history that Carla Garapedian's documentary Screamers seeks to rectify."

Jason Clark: "A sort of Reds with cholera in the Far East swapped for the Russian Revolution and a whole lot more bitterness and resentment between its central couple, The Painted Veil is more or less from the school of motion picture that Pauline Kael used to say 'reeks of quality.'" More from Nick Schager.

Ed Gonzalez on Unaccompanied Minors: "The film has an excellent pedigree, but when it poops it stinks of a Tim Allen movie."

Rob Humanick: "Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj defines pedestrian filmmaking on every conceivable level, yet this embracement of mediocrity lends a surprising amount of legitimacy to its juvenile subject matter." More from Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times.

Posted by dwhudson at December 3, 2006 3:06 PM