Performance Art: The Best Acting of 2007 - Female

By PopMatters Staff

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. [9 January 2008]

Taking Woodstock

By Cynthia Fuchs

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. [28 August 2009]

The Ice Storm

By Matt Mazur

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. [4 April 2008]

Lust, Caution (Se, jie)

By Cynthia Fuchs

The primary question in Lust, Caution (Se, jie) is: "What is real?" [5 October 2007]

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

By Cynthia Fuchs

While the movie's poetry is often stunning, the DVD docs are decidedly and disappointingly banal. [12 April 2006]

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

By Cynthia Fuchs

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)

By Todd R. Ramlow

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)

By Todd R. Ramlow

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)

By Cynthia Fuchs

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)

By Lucas Hilderbrand

The film's narrative unfolds slowly -- too slowly at first.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

By Oliver Wang

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.

Mixed Media: Ang Lee is Americana (video)

Short Ends and Leader: 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. [9 June 2008]

Sex and violence are not always gratuitous, directors say [12 November 2007]

Ang Lee’s ‘Lust, Caution’ has sense and sensuality [4 October 2007]