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PETER KEOUGH
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"Copraphagy" is a key word at this year's Boston Underground Film Festival at the Brattle.
Nuclear family
Sally Potter likes to mess around with form and narrative.
This year's Boston Turkish Film Festival includes works in which directors ponder the relationships between the secular and the religious, between men and women, and between destiny and identity.
In Roman Coppola's sophomoric second feature (his 2001 debut CQ was promising), Charlie Sheen shows restraint as the titular asshole, a dissolute ad designer and solipsistic whiner who's mooning over the loss of his latest love.
Had Ed Wood Jr. directed Fritz Lang's Metropolis , he couldn't have achieved the earnest dopiness of Juan Solanas's sci-fi allegory — nor the striking images.
Judging from their contributions, some of the filmmakers behind this 26-part anthology find death less fearsome than the thought of a cute girl farting.
Life during wartime
Although set in Germany in the last days of World War II, Australian director Cate Shortland's harsh and poetic survival tale recalls the dreamlike allegory of Nicholas Roeg's Outback-set Walkabout (1971).
The blockbusters are coming, but this spring Hollywood offers a brief respite, movies that transport audiences to different realms, that awaken dreams, and evoke the magic of love and the imagination, films with titles like Trance , To the Wonder , and Oblivion .
Not long ago, Newton native Alex Karpovsky thought his filmmaking career was finished.
As seen in Susan Youssef's wrenching Habibi , it's not easy being a poet in Palestine.
First-time French director Mikael Buch makes it easy to categorize his characters in this sometimes funny, often strident farce.
Lab Rat
Maybe because he's one himself, Alex Karpovsky has a knack for making movies about obsessives.
Outside the frame
Park Chan-wook, whose Korean films Oldboy , Thirst , and others have earned him cult status in the West, acknowledges the similarities between his first Hollywood movie, Stoker , and Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt . Call it an homage, since a Hitchcock film convinced him to become a director.
Revenge play
Park Chan-wook takes his time terrifying an audience.
The situation may reshuffle by the Oscar broadcast on February 24, but I doubt it. After being snubbed in the Best Director category, Argo has won every award since.
Survival skills
David France's powerful How To Survive a Plague, recording the battle to obtain treatment in the early days of the AIDS crisis, has deservedly been nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar.
Working stiffs
This Kino Classics release is worth it if only for historical purposes, since it demonstrates that from the start zombie films embodied the Marxist paradigm of capitalism (Lugosi) versus labor (zombies).
Mis spelled
Throughout his adaptation of Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's YA novel, Richard Lagravenese drops the names of books that would have provided a more rewarding way of spending a couple of hours than watching this movie.
Outside The Frame
Maybe it was the moment in The Last Stand when a guy exploded, or the scene when Arnold sawed someone in half with a Vickers machine gun, or maybe it was the 10th brain-splattering bullet to the head in Sylvester Stallone's Bullet to the Head .
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