Mark Olsen

Superior Mother: The Orphanage

Mark Olsen
The Orphanage is a film that often makes something out of nothing — something being scaring the bejesus out of you. Director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez ratchet up the tension to such excruciating heights that, while you’re watching the film, your impulse is to scream out......
The Method (El Mtodo Gronholm)

Recent Spanish Cinema 2006

Mark Olsen
This latest installment of the American Cinematheque’s Recent Spanish Cinema series opens with Princesses (Princesas), from director Fernando León de Aranoa (Mondays in the Sun). In this unflinching yet surprisingly warm portrait of female camaraderie, a middle-class housewife (Candela Peña, who won a Spanish Goya award for her performance) moonlights......
Harron in the here and now

It Takes All Types

Mark Olsen
The Notorious Bettie Page may be set in the 1950s, but filmmaker Mary Harron plainly intends to speak to our here and now. The story of model Bettie Page, an icon for her bangs and bondage photos, the film traces Page’s path from Tennessee schoolgirl, to big-city pinup, to her......
Real World Observer. Courtesy Palm Pictures

The Last of the Independents

Mark Olsen
Without much fanfare, Michael Almereyda has developed into one of the most intriguing and intellectually rewarding filmmakers at work on the American independent scene. When he followed up his surprising modern-day Hamlet with the even more adventurous Happy Here and Now, the latter film was met with a resounding shrug......

The Tarantino Factor (According to Chan-Wook Park)

Mark Olsen
On a crisp and sunny morning last fall, South Korean filmmaker Chan-Wook Park — whose 2004 Grand Jury Prize win for the comedy-thriller Oldboy at Cannes had just raised alarums in some film-critical circles (see review, this page) — seemed every bit the latest elegant and exotic export of Asian......

Interloper

Mark Olsen
“If I had started to think about it as a problem, which it was, I would have probably not made the film. There have always been parts of my decisions that are hidden from me, but what was special this time was it really came like a meteorite. It came......

Good Rep

Mark Olsen
Photo by Jay Muhlin Le Cercle Rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville's rarely seen 1970 gangster-heist film — opening Friday for a two-week run at the Nuart — is the latest reissue by the New York-based distribution company Rialto Pictures. Founded in 1997 by Long Island native Bruce Goldstein, Rialto has become a......

Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink

Mark Olsen
MIKE MYERS' LEFT-FIELD GOOF OF A COMEDY franchise has already lasted longer than anybody had a right to expect. The first installment, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery -- an oddly sui generis spoof on the James Bond series, and probably funniest the third time you saw it -- was......

Sympathy for the Devil

Mark Olsen
Most first-time filmmakers probably would not make a debut feature in which one of the most sympathetic characters is a pederast. Michael Cuesta, director and co-writer of L.I.E., did. A director of television commercials and a commercial photographer, a regular-guy suburban family man who lives on Long Island and was......

The Contender

Mark Olsen
At the U.S. premiere of his debut feature, Amores Perros, at last fall’s New York Film Festival -- following awards and accolades from festivals around the globe and box-office success in his native Mexico -- director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu stood in the spotlight in front of family, friends and a......