Undoing.

"In Undoing, Chris Chan Lee takes up where Raymond Chandler left off (sort of) and turns the bowels of Los Angeles into a stage for a noirish meditation on the nature of good and evil," writes Julia Wallace.

"The movie's Korean-American reimagining of film noir clichés holds your attention," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "Unfortunately, an arsenal of unnecessary editing devices - including jump cuts, montages of still frames and gratuitously sped and slowed motion - plays like unnecessary insurance against audience boredom and betrays a lack of faith in a movie that's tough and heartfelt enough to get along fine without them."

"If Lee had simply shot the film straight on, he might have had more time and energy for the characters," suggests David Wiegand in the San Francisco Chronicle. "Lee might have done well to consider a bit of advice Hemingway once gave a famous actress about the dangers of confusing motion with action. In this case, that would include shaky-camera shots."

But Bruce Bennett, writing in the New York Sun, finds Undoing "a film of discrete sensitivity and unusual emotional intelligence.... Sincere, smart, and exceptionally well-cast and performed, the film clicks in ways that similar low-budget gangster dramas simply can't."

"In its best moments, the film seems to metamorphose into a wordless horror film, its characters solemnly wandering their modern landscapes as if prisoners of their bodies," writes Rob Humanick in Slant. "Come for these occasional moments of visual elation, but stay for Ceiri Torjussen's sporadically great score, which seems to echo from some distant netherworld were the ghosts of the departed continue their aimless drift."

Posted by dwhudson at December 5, 2007 1:15 PM