Nigel Smith

Review: Bright Star
By Nigel Smith
December 4, 2009 - 11:37pm
Jane Campion the Romantic

The swooning, romantic period drama Bright Star chronicles the three-year romance between revered Romantic poet John Keats and young Fanny Brawne cut short due to Keats’s death at the age of 25. In telling this intimate tale of first love, the gifted director and writer Jane Campion (The Piano) has crafted a film that plays like one of Keats’s poems brought to life.

Review: Enter the Void
By Nigel Smith
October 30, 2009 - 8:26pm
Gaspar Noe nixes substance for style, in his follow up to Irreversible.

Lars Von Trier. Park Chan-wook. Michael Haneke. Provocative auteurs like these are masters whose works are defined by their distinctive approach to divisive subject matter. France’s Gaspar Noe looked to be one of the tribe with his first feature, Irreversible. Told in a real-time backwards narrative, the film is infamous for an unflinching nine-minute rape sequence featured in the film’s first half. Yet as the film unraveled itself, it presented a dilemma.