Email Author Dennis Lim

2002 Stories by Dennis Lim

• Hollywood Ending

  published June 4, 2002

  Tolstoy's short novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the outcome of an existential crisis that followed the publication of Anna Karenina... More >>

• Waking Life

  published May 28, 2002

  In Christopher Münch's The Sleepy Time Gal, a middle-aged woman's cancer diagnosis spurs attempts at resolution and reconciliation.... More >>

• Credit History

  published May 28, 2002

  Six years and 13 credit cards in the making, John Gianvito's The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (at BAM May 31 through June 6; see More >>

• Le Chic by Geek

  published May 21, 2002

  If Sofia Coppola's ethereal The Virgin Suicides lifted the weight of a burdensome family name off the first-time director, big brother... More >>

• Unbehagen

  published May 14, 2002

  World-traveling art-bohemia chronicler Peter Sempel calls Nina Hagen = Punk + Glory (at Anthology Film Archives through May 21) a... More >>

• October Symphonies

  published May 7, 2002

  The defining moment in the Pet Shop Boys canon is a poignant backward glance; the corresponding one in Pulp's a stricken vision from the future.... More >>

• Beyond Belief

  published May 7, 2002

  Ryan Gosling, who gives an astonishing performance as a Jewish neo-Nazi in Henry Bean's lurid pulp shocker The Believer (opening May 17),... More >>

• Blind Man's Bluff

  published April 30, 2002

  Woody Allen has been cracking wise about mortality since he was a young man, but Hollywood Ending, the 66-year-old director's 31st feature... More >>

• Thrill Kill Cult

  published April 23, 2002

  Yet another tale of two bright, privileged young men driven to homicide by existential boredom, Murder by Numbers joins a bulging dossier... More >>

• What Time Is It There?

  published April 16, 2002

  The century-old dream of time travel remains one of our greatest control fantasies—irrational and irresistible, supremely conducive to... More >>

• Collision Courses

  published April 16, 2002

  Channeling Godard's Week-end after a course of road-rage therapy, Changing Lanes locates its site of redemption on the FDR, amid the... More >>

• Seasons in the Sun

  published April 9, 2002

  French cinematographer Eric Gautier sums up his professional credo straightforwardly enough: "Never do the same thing twice—it's just too... More >>

• Captured by the Game

  published March 26, 2002

  You are what you do. The phrase can evoke either Stakhanovite zeal or Bartleby despair. Laurent Cantet's Time Out, a smoldering fireball of... More >>

• The Reckless Moment

  published March 19, 2002

  Writing in these pages 10 years ago about an explosion of gay-themed movies on the festival circuit, critic B. Ruby Rich employed the phrase "new... More >>

• Blinded Without Science

  published March 12, 2002

  H.G. Wells invented science fiction by muddying the expansive whimsy of Victorian futurism with fin de siècle dread. His great-grandson's... More >>

• Trig Your Own Hole

  published March 5, 2002

  If only the filmmakers of 40 Days and 40 Nights had been more literally formulaic and arrived at their title via mathematical equations,... More >>

• Your Disco Needs Her

  published February 26, 2002

  Kylie's at No. 1. She's fun, she's feminine, she's everything the Taliban hate most. All the more reason to love her. —The Daily... More >>

• Drama of the Gifted Child

  published February 26, 2002

  A bristling hybrid of nature documentary and philosophy dissertation, Esther Kahn essentially casts an East End wild child in the role of... More >>

• Gimme Shelter

  published February 5, 2002

  Not least because reality checks are in such scant supply elsewhere, the documentary lineup at Sundance has long been a safe haven. Here the... More >>

• Search and Rescue Operations

  published January 29, 2002

  PARK CITY, UTAH—In Gus Van Sant's Gerry, two guys on a nature hike get lost, wander about, prattle on and on, search for... More >>

• Being Edwin Abbott

  published January 15, 2002

  An unspeakable horror seized me. There was a darkness; then a dizzy, sickening sensation of sight that was not like seeing; I saw a Line that... More >>