Ang LeeFeatures
Performance Art: The Best Acting of 2007 - FemaleFrom 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. [9 January 2008] Reviews
Taking WoodstockThe 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. [28 August 2009]
The Ice StormThe 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. [4 April 2008]
Lust, Caution (Se, jie)The primary question in Lust, Caution (Se, jie) is: "What is real?" [5 October 2007]
Brokeback Mountain (2005)While the movie's poetry is often stunning, the DVD docs are decidedly and disappointingly banal. [12 April 2006]
Brokeback Mountain (2005)It's Alma's silence that makes Brokeback Mountain feel so serious. Her pain is neither exquisite nor elegiac. It is only hard. [9 December 2005]
The Hulk (2003)In Hulk, the comic books' critique of institutional authority and the way U.S. culture perceives and deals with difference is evacuated. [19 June 2003]
Ride with the Devil (1999)Ride with the Devil is essentially two films in one. The first is a story of loyalty - to family, community, and nation - tested in the social and political upheavals of civil war. The second is a story of male bonding and love in a homosocial order, the negotiation of male-male desire, and male domestication, all triangulated and enabled through the body of a woman. [1 January 1995]
Ride with the Devil (1999)Ride With the Devil dares to bring yet another version. Directed by Ang Lee and written by Lee and his usual collaborator James Schamus (who adapted Daniel Woodrell's novel Woe to Live On, a novel inspired, says the author, by today's warfare in the Balkans), the film is rather surprising, and not only because it stars Jewel as a Southern widow. Telling stories that don't usually get told, Ride With the Devil focuses on some of the War's more disgraceful and outrageous aspects, both personal and public.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)One doesn't need a Kung Fu Cinema background to enjoy 'Crouching Tiger', but it helps in appreciating how the movie builds on -- and arguably surpasses -- that rich cinematic tradition. Blogs
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