Jurgen & Marcy's Independent Film Blog March 2007 Archive

Two bad boys of indie cinema team up for an outrageous exploitation double feature: Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof and Robert Rodriguez' Planet Terror make up the two halves of Grindhouse, ... Read More

Susanne Bier's Oscar-nominated film about a man who returns to Copenhagen after twenty years at an orphanage in India is a family drama full of secrets, manipulation, and shocking revelations. ... Read More

Dumped on an unsuspecting public on Christmas day, Alfonso Cuaron's spectacular dystopian thriller Children of Men didn't make megabucks at the box office and was shamefully overlooked by the Academy. ... Read More

Mina Nair did a lovely job adapting Jhumpa Lahiri's best-selling novel The Namesake. In fact, in one of those rare instances, the accomplished filmmaker (Monsoon Wedding) improved upon the book. ... Read More

Danish director Susanne Bier didn't win the Oscar for After the Wedding, the family melodrama opening this week, but she's not done with Hollywood yet: her first English-language film Things ... Read More

A Jewish proto-Frankenstein, teenage Charlotte Gainsbourg, and bumbling Korean policemen hunting a serial killer: we've added reviews of three DVDs that are well worth your attention. Paul Wegener's 1920 The Golem, ... Read More

"Two Solutions for One Problem", a short film by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, "My Name is Oona," an experimental short by Gunvor Nelson, and Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter ... Read More

Five terrific films that slipped through theaters in 2006 are available on DVD today: The Bridesmaid, the latest chillling thriller from French master Claude Chabrol, Joey Lauren Adam's directorial debut ... Read More

In Ken Loach's Irish war epic, Cillian Murphy plays Damien O'Donovan, an educated, likable young man with hopes and dreams and a crush on a beautiful girl named Sinead. ... Read More

Jürgen proclaimed John Cameron Mitchell's sexually explicit Shortbus to be "a watershed that divides other movies with similar themes into before and after. It's that good." One of the best ... Read More

Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder) proves that it's possible to make CGI extravaganzas that entertain without insulting an audience's intelligence. The Host grafts droll humor and sly political commentary onto ... Read More

Sacha Baron Cohen’s outrageous, Oscar-nominated road trip Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is out this week on DVD, loaded with special features. If ... Read More

Philip Gröning lived in a monk's cell in the French Alps for six months to make this very quiet documentary about the Carthusians, who are among the world's most ascetic ... Read More