Reviews

Belgium's Oscar submission, Frédéric Fonteyne and Anne Paulicevich's delightful and insightful Working Girls, is about a trio of French women who are sex workers in Belgium when they're not at their day jobs. The empowering film shows how men still think they own women and how three of them decide to fight back. All three leads are fantastic (I especially loved Noémie Lvovsky) as is the deft and swift direction (but never at the expense of the character nuances) and smart script. This film deserves recognition.

Texas is a startlingly amazing movie that resonates with life in the many small towns in today's United States--especially the restlessness yet simultaneous complacency! The director is an impressive storyteller. I highly recommend this terrific film. The acting is uniformly excellent--including the director himself and 2 of the screenwriters. This film deserves to get a release in America and hopefully will soon.

By the way, anyone who can't endure the first 60 minutes should stick to seeing the Hollywood paint-by-numbers crap that is coming out and leave innovative, exciting cinema to those who can appreciate it.

Lars von Trier has made a groundbreaking, provocative, unsettling and tremendously important masterpiece that is a profoundly urgent comment on the times we live in and the people of this country and our hypocritical morality. And as a filmmaker von Trier has no pier right now. He is THE master. The cast is brilliant and Nicole Kidman is especially astonishing.