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2 articles from 2008

17 June 2008 7:03 AM, PDT | From ifc.com | See recent IFC news

By Michael Atkinson

Maybe it's jumping the gun to say so, but is the Romanian New Wave kaput already? The latest and most-Cannes-honored post-postmodern, hyperrealist, ex-dictatorship, young-auteur film movement seems to have already fizzled . after Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" (2007) emerged with last year's Palme D'Or, nothing new has appeared at the world's festivals from Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristi Puiu, Catalin Mitulescu or Radu Jude, at a time when they should be leaping on their global visibility and market success like five-year-olds on a summer puddle. In his prime, Godard would've churned out five features and three shorts in the three years since the scent of Romanian sulfur first hit the air with Puiu's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" (2005). Who knows what's keeping them (Puiu hasn't had a credit in three years), or what bureaucratic Kafka-ness they must battle to get one of their extraordinarily inexpensive movies made,

Michael Atkinson

3 June 2008 2:04 PM, PDT | From avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news

When it was released 25 years ago—and for some time afterwards, on home video—Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva must have seemed like the coolest French movie around—hip, stylish, colorful, full of great music, and hewed closely enough to Hollywood convention as to not be inaccessible. It marked the beginnings of a small but defining movement in French film called "Cinema Du Look," which trafficked in slick imagery and navel-gazing romanticism over anything that remotely resembled substance. (See also: the films of Luc Besson and Leos Carax.) Seen today, Diva has lost some of its original magic, since its super-glossy aesthetic has been co-opted innumerable times, often to greater effect, by contemporary French, Hong Kong, and American art movies. And since there's little but empty calories in the convoluted plot of a young postman on the lam, it's a struggle to glean much of value from the movie. Leading a solitary.

Scott Tobias

2 articles from 2008