Email Author Dennis Lim

2005 Stories by Dennis Lim

• Troubled in Paradise

  published December 13, 2005

  Claire Denis's tactile tone poems are premised on the primacy of sensory experience. Beau Travail (1999), her ecstatic Billy Budd... More >>

• Anything But Sly: Secret Family-Holiday-Movie Formula Revealed

  published December 6, 2005

  It's hard to fathom why anyone would voluntarily endure a holiday family reunion movie (hereafter HFRM)—a genre devised solely to demonstrate... More >>

• Name Game

  published December 6, 2005

  Smartly counterprogrammed opposite the orientalized depictions of Asian femininity in Memoirs of a Geisha, The Grace Lee Project is... More >>

• Orient Excess

  published November 29, 2005

  In their great geisha dramas, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi bring an unblinking focus to the everyday realities of being a working woman:... More >>

• Dante's Inferno

  published November 22, 2005

  TURIN, ITALY "This is a horror story because most of the characters are Republicans," director Joe Dante announced before the November 13... More >>

• An Experience of Serene Bewilderment

  published November 22, 2005

  World cinema's premier maker of mysterious objects, Apichatpong Weerasethakul is on a one-man mission to change the way we watch movies. Rich and... More >>

• Close-Up

  published November 8, 2005

  BAM's tribute to Gena Rowlands closes with a new print of John Cassavetes's final film, the all too rarely screened and still underappreciated ... More >>

• Four More Music Video Veterans Enshrined in Pop Canon

  published November 1, 2005

  Palm's first batch of pop-promo anthologies celebrated the medium's three kings, all of whom had distinct shticks and personalities: Spike Jonze... More >>

• Frame Canada

  published October 25, 2005

  VANCOUVER, CANADA—For an event of its size—300-plus films over two and a half weeks—the Vancouver International Film... More >>

• Cobain Bio a Brilliant Narcotic Fog

  published October 25, 2005

  Last Days, the brilliant concluding chapter in the death trilogy that inspired Gus Van Sant's artistic rebirth, wafts through the final 48... More >>

• Brain Humor

  published October 18, 2005

  October 26, 1999 It was always self-evident that when Spike Jonze, the most offhandedly avant-garde and whacked-out of the MTV brats,... More >>

• Jaggedly Dreamy Film Contemplates the Unthinkable

  published October 18, 2005

  Is it possible for a child to "love" a pedophile? Not by any reasonable definition of love. But in daring to contemplate the unthinkable, Gregg... More >>

• The Last Thing She Wanted

  published September 27, 2005

  The heart sinks at the very idea of Joan Didion's new book. The Year of Magical Thinking is a meticulous chronicle of a wretched spell that... More >>

• The Young and the Restless

  published September 13, 2005

  TORONTO—Well stocked with gay cowboys, juvenile killers, and sexually curious jailbait, Toronto '05 was the festival of the young... More >>

• The Way of the Gun

  published September 13, 2005

  "The violence that matters most to people is the violence done to the human body," says David Cronenberg, whose newest film, A History of... More >>

• A History of Cronenberg

  published September 13, 2005

  David Cronenberg's career spans four decades, 20-plus films (including 16 features), multiple viral strains, and a ton of enthusiastic... More >>

• Middlebrow Adaptation of a Math Play Doesn't Add Up

  published September 6, 2005

  A Miramax prestige pic based on David Auburn's Pulitzer-winning Broadway hit, Proof insists that life is not as tidy as... More >>

• Do Look Back

  published August 23, 2005

  Never mind if the fall's new releases look a little spotty—the city's repertory houses are preparing for an abundant season, and in most... More >>

• Adventures of a Desultory Twentysomething

  published August 23, 2005

  Most of the ha-has in Funny Ha Ha are not exactly funny: Andrew Bujalski's debut feature is foremost a squirming comedy of recognition.... More >>

• Eclectic Boogaloo

  published August 16, 2005

  "My major contribution was making him a crier," says Justin Theroux of the sensitive, swashbuckling geode magnate he plays in Michael Showalter's... More >>

• Dirty Dancing

  published August 16, 2005

  Like so many films that target a gay male audience, Three Dancing Slaves transpires in an abstract parallel universe where half the... More >>

• Strangers on a Plane

  published August 9, 2005

  Call Wes Craven's Red Eye a claustro-thriller—a compact model of B movie, cheap in spirit if not always budget, that relies on the... More >>

• The Incorporation of Dreams

  published August 2, 2005

  Routinely debunked yet unshakably entrenched, Freud's basic conception of man as subject to repressed primitive instincts refuses to budge from... More >>

• The Descent of Man

  published July 26, 2005

  The Nile perch was introduced to Lake Victoria some 40 to 50 years ago, an apparent attempt to replenish the overfished waters that led to the... More >>

• Film

  published July 19, 2005

  KARLOVY VARY, CZECH REPUBLIC—Most of the year, the oldest spa town in Bohemia, nestled in a picturesque valley 80 miles west of... More >>