Email Author Dennis Lim

2003 Stories by Dennis Lim

• Six Degrees of Separation in Three Frames Of Disjunction

  published December 9, 2003

  Trendier than ever (or at least easier to actualize, thanks to advances in digital shooting and editing), the split-screen device often retains... More >>

• Fuguet's Memory Palace has a Gabriel García Marquee

  published December 2, 2003

  Thirtysomething seismologist Beltrán Soler is en route from Santiago to Tokyo when geological and emotional tremors turn his LAX layover... More >>

• The Three Kings of Music Video Unveil Their Weapons of Choice

  published December 2, 2003

  Catching up with the late-20th-century truism that pop promos are the closest mass culture gets to poetry, Palm Pictures' overdue Directors Label... More >>

• You Better Watch Out: This Santa's Got a Brand-New Fuckstick

  published November 25, 2003

  Reeking of stale whiskey and urine, awash in phlegmy torrents of baroque obscenity, Bad Santa positions itself as an act of seasonal... More >>

• Girl Who Likes Girl Who Likes Boy: Taipei Teens Work It Out

  published November 18, 2003

  Stringing together a daisy chain of unrequited teen crushes, the Taipei-set Blue Gate Crossing flutters between the sweetly muted and the... More >>

• Pacific Heights

  published November 18, 2003

  VANCOUVER, CANADA—Among its numerous idiosyncratic highlights, last month's Vancouver Film Festival featured a sidebar of L.A. movies... More >>

• Under the Skin

  published November 11, 2003

  "I wanted her to be a virgin in terms of psychological trauma," says Marina de Van of Esther, the self-mutilating character she plays in her... More >>

• Into the Cut

  published November 4, 2003

  About 10 minutes into In My Skin, French actor-writer-director Marina de Van's tour de force of existential and dermatological horror,... More >>

• Infinity, IYI

  published October 28, 2003

  Given his pan-intellectual dexterity and neurotically analytic zeal, his taste for vicious circles and recursive loops, his ability to locate... More >>

• Meltingest-Pot Tenement Saves Thanksgiving for White Girl

  published October 14, 2003

  In the reliably indigestible genre of the Thanksgiving-reunion movie, Pieces of April is easily the biggest turkey yet—a gluttonous... More >>

• Between Desire and Deficiency

  published September 30, 2003

  "Stop me making movies of myself," professional drama queen Rufus Wainwright pleads on his new Want One. It's a less disingenuous request... More >>

• The Rise of the Machines

  published September 16, 2003

  A shiny, wireless perpetual-motion machine, forever in flux as if to stave off obsolescence, Olivier Assayas's demonlover makes other... More >>

• Found in Translation

  published September 9, 2003

  VENICE, ITALY—The 60th edition of the world's oldest film festival concluded with a ringing endorsement of the new. Russian director... More >>

• Desert Blue

  published September 9, 2003

  No audience reaction in Venice came close to the one accorded Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms: hysterical laughter, sardonic applause,... More >>

• A Guy Thing

  published September 9, 2003

  In Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World, Depression-era Winnipeg plays host to the titular international competition (sponsored by... More >>

• Whim Wenders

  published August 26, 2003

  A pair of glowering Buenos Aires dykes kidnap a dumpy, depressed lingerie salesgirl at knifepoint, hijack a taxi, and . . . take her to the beach?... More >>

• Vienna Sizzles, and Sweaty Austrians Do the Wrong Thing

  published August 19, 2003

  It's getting hot in hier: An abject—and pointedly Austrian—contribution to the heat-wave mini-genre, Ulrich Seidl's Dog Days observes... More >>

• Killing Me Softly

  published August 5, 2003

  Wrong Cure title: Charlotte Sometimes, which tunnels into the achy, nebulous, downtime-filled lives of a few L.A. twentysomethings, would... More >>

• Tooth and Nail

  published July 29, 2003

  Last seen playing straight woman to an indignant Jack Nicholson, a naked Kathy Bates, and a mulletted Dermot Mulroney in About Schmidt,... More >>

• Bad Boys, Too

  published July 29, 2003

  While Strand's gay-shorts series took a tentative step toward maturity with 2000's Boys Life 3, this fourth anthology represents a... More >>

• Auto Focus

  published July 22, 2003

  "This is a murder mystery novel," announces 15-year-old Christopher Boone, the hero of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the... More >>

• Unhappy Mondays

  published July 22, 2003

  American movies may consider work a four-letter word, but their European counterparts are somewhat less allergic, whether in depicting the... More >>

• Trauma Center

  published July 15, 2003

  An omnibus of short films about September 11, rushed into production within months of the attacks and timed to premiere on the one-year... More >>

• Dive, She Said

  published July 1, 2003

  In François Ozon's films—no less than in, say, Virginia Woolf or Tsai Ming-liang—water is a symbol of the ungovernable,... More >>

• Micro Softies

  published June 24, 2003

  On_Line marks a milestone of sorts in the evolution of the masturbatory genre one might call the Sundance rom-com—not for the... More >>