Features
Monday, August 15 2011
The 100 Essential Directors Part 5: Derek Jarman to Mike Leigh
Mid-way through our series, Day 5 is a glorious mishmash of international auteurist cinema. Today we go from saints and sinners, from Brookyln to Britain, from the beginning of time to the Dystopian future, and around the world and beyond.
Wednesday, January 9 2008
Performance Art: The Best Acting of 2007 - Female
From the most sweetly nuanced performance of Jennifer Jason Leigh's career to Cate Blanchett's revelatory portrayal of Bob Dylan in I'm Not There, the women of 2007 were stellar.
Columns
Thursday, January 28 2010
The Ice Storm: America Out in the Cold
Ang Lee captures the '70s on film the way Rick Moody captures the era in the book The Ice Storm. It's the midst of the sexual revolution, the Watergate scandal is erupting, and the country's social consciousness is changing.
Reviews
Friday, May 14 2010
In 'Ride With The Devil' the Boundaries Between North and South and Slave and Free Blur
Ride With The Devil is a film that resists narrative convention. The audience is not enlisted to help solve any problem, there is no end to the war, no intended destination, and it’s not clear for whom we should be rooting.
Friday, August 28 2009
Taking Woodstock
The Ang Lee take on Woodstock never gets much beyond these clichés: hippies took drugs, rain made mud, the music was great and crowds were huge.
Friday, April 4 2008
The Ice Storm
The general fuzzed-out sense of malaise that Lee is able to tap into while exploring the Nixon-era sexual revolution (and repression and adventure), creates a point of view that both ruthlessly observes and empathizes with these alien suburbanites.
Friday, October 5 2007
Lust, Caution (Se, jie)
The primary question in Lust, Caution (Se, jie) is: "What is real?"
Wednesday, April 12 2006
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
While the movie's poetry is often stunning, the DVD docs are decidedly and disappointingly banal.
Blogs
Wednesday, December 16 2009
Taking Woodstock (2009): Blu-ray
It is often called the ultimate expression of the Summer of Love, a gathering of nearly half a million like minded individuals, all with the…
Tuesday, August 25 2009
Ang Lee is Americana (video)
Director Ang Lee has yet again tackled a seminal part of the American Dream in Taking Woodstock. Perhaps it is his immigrant perspective (he arrived…
Monday, June 9 2008
Hulk: Revisited
In preparation for the franchise reboot starring Edward Norton, SE&L looks back at Ang Lee's 2003 version of the Big Green Meanie, a criminally marginalized movie that truly didn't deserve the critical or commercial drubbing it took at the time.
News
Monday, November 12 2007
Sex and violence are not always gratuitous, directors say
What has more sex and violence than an episode of "The Jerry Springer Show"? The multiplex. You can pass through any neighborhood in America and…
Thursday, October 4 2007
Ang Lee's 'Lust, Caution' has sense and sensuality
NEW YORK -- Ang Lee remembers what it was like when he decided to make "Sense and Sensibility," his first English-language film. The condescension. The…
