Nathan Lee

The Witnesses: Once upon a time when we were disease-free; Credit: Strand Releasing

Andre Techine's The Witnesses: Plague Season

Nathan Lee
Sex and chance brought them together, one furtive summer night, in the cruising grounds of a wooded Parisian park. Adrien (Michel Blanc), a doctor: bourgeois, middle-aged, world-weary, on the prowl for boys. Manu (Johan Libereau), a boy: beaming, naive, freshly arrived in Paris, on the prowl for experience. Flattered by......
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Untraceable: You Kill Me

Nathan Lee
Regarding the irrelevance of Untraceable: First of all, torture is so 2007, and just because this drab little thriller with a flashy love of pain imagines itself a "critique of violence" doesn't make it any less superfluous. Second of all, untraceable? Ha! You wish. While it's true that the villain......

MTV Opera

Nathan Lee
In the spring of 1981, Jean-Jacques Beineix unveiled his debut film in Paris: a brash, snazzy thriller about the infatuation of a sullen young deliveryman (Frédéric Andréi) with a reclusive opera diva (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez), the bootleg he makes at one of her performances, and the dizzy dilemmas that ensue......

Strangers On a Train

Nathan Lee
The estranged brothers Whitman have reunited for a journey onboard the Darjeeling Limited, a colorful old locomotive traversing the Rajasthan region of India. Along the way, they will stop to visit temples (“Probably one of the most spiritual places on Earth!”) and shop for souvenirs (slippers, cobras, pepper spray), with......

So Close, and Yet So Far

Nathan Lee
The exemplary achievements of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival succeeded by two means: either narrowing the gap between author and subject in pursuit of intimate effects, or else working distance into the material and profiting from the vantage. Contemporary neo-realism at its most confident and alert, Chop Shop finds......

Reality, According to Cronenberg

Nathan Lee
In the first few minutes of Eastern Promises, the striking new thriller from David Cronenberg, a throat is sliced, a uterus hemorrhages, and a newborn baby, slimy and palpitating, emerges from the womb of its dead mother. None of which comes as much of a surprise from the maker of......

Cruising

Nathan Lee
The psychosexual dynamic of Cruising, William Friedkin’s notorious 1980 thriller starring Al Pacino as an NYPD cop deranged — sexually and otherwise — by his contact with the hardcore gay underground, is certainly questionable (deliberately so, to some extent), though in chalking up violent homoerotic impulses to unresolved daddy issues,......

Cruising

Nathan Lee
The psychosexual dynamic of Cruising, William Friedkin’s notorious 1980 thriller starring Al Pacino as an NYPD cop deranged — sexually and otherwise — by his contact with the hardcore gay underground, is certainly questionable (deliberately so, to some extent), though in chalking up violent homoerotic impulses to unresolved daddy issues,......
Are those pingpong paddles in your pocket or . . . (Photo by Gemma La Mana)

Test My Balls of Fury

Nathan Lee
1. Balls of Fury is a movie about: a. A former table-tennis prodigy (Dan Fogler as Randy Daytona) enlisted by the FBI to infiltrate the underground pingpong tournament of a legendary Chinese criminal (Christopher Walken). b. Suppository jokes. c. Little worth discussing and even less worth seeing. d. All of......
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209 Weeks Later

Nathan Lee
{mosimage} Four years after “Mission Accomplished,” 28 Weeks Later reminds us that the mission, whatever the hell it was to begin with, is now officially, apocalyptically fucked. The story thus far: Seven months have gone by since the Rage virus passed from chimp fang to British bloodstream in an animal-rights......