Email Author Michelle Orange

2008 Stories by Michelle Orange

• Lake City Flooded With Twangy Tropes and Torpidity

  published November 19, 2008

  Troy Garity has a rangy, lonesome-stranger body and pouchy eyes. He can boot a cigarette butt to the curb like a champ and fill a frame with... More >>

• Stages

  published November 5, 2008

  In Stages, Dutch director Mijke de Jong's tensile family microdrama, the camera gets closer to its three main subjects than they can... More >>

• Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie

  published October 15, 2008

  Straight outta the woolly nethers of Portsmouth, Ohio, comes Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie, Jay Delaney's infiltration of a two-man... More >>

• The Sleek But Unwieldy Azur and Asmar

  published October 15, 2008

  With its delicate, fairy-tale bones and layer of politically conscious muscle, Azur and Asmar is a sleek and yet slightly unwieldy... More >>

• Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time Gets Its Comeback

  published October 8, 2008

  Cynics make the worst romantics; they should know better, they know they should know better, and they'd die if you knew better. Forced... More >>

• An Ode to Trailblazing Publisher Barney Rosset in Obscene

  published September 23, 2008

  Barney Rosset is a tragic hero. He says so himself at the end of Obscene, stating—by way of a colleague's parting shot—what... More >>

• Ripple Effect: Bad Writing, Acting, and Editing

  published September 23, 2008

  Several ordinarily banal movies soldered into one amazingly bad one, Ripple Effect cannot be excused on the grounds of overweening... More >>

• Hounddog

  published September 17, 2008

  Having lurched through a gantlet of Sundance jeers, recuts, and release delays, writer/director Deborah Kampmeier's Hounddog—at... More >>

• Able Danger

  published September 10, 2008

  Though it knocks along with the steady heartbeat pace of a thriller and is painted in the languid, low-contrast shadows of a noir, Paul Krik's... More >>

• Forgiveness

  published September 10, 2008

  Told with the tumbling urgency of the deeply personal, the story of Forgiveness, Udi Aloni's portrait of an American-Israeli soldier in... More >>

• Richard Serra: Thinking On Your Feet

  published August 19, 2008

  It is happily noted in the press materials for Richard Serra: Thinking On Your Feet, Maria Anna Tappeiner's documentary about the... More >>

• I.O.U.S.A.

  published August 19, 2008

  Both a handy election primer and a bowel-rattling cry of fiscal doom, I.O.U.S.A. is an Inconvenient Truth for the debt crisis, a... More >>

• The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2

  published August 5, 2008

  Resist if you dare, and for as long as you must, but even the hoariest haters eventually succumbed to the girly, cottony charms of 2005's... More >>

• Back to Normandy

  published July 23, 2008

  Determined to cast only locals in his adaptation of Michel Foucault's I, Pierre Rivière, director René Allio combed... More >>

• CSNY: Déjà Vu

  published July 23, 2008

  Neil Young wanted to tour the country that re-elected George W. Bush, dole out some demerits, light some fires, and maybe even sell a few... More >>

• The Man Who Bottled Clouds

  published July 16, 2008

  Making its world premiere as part of "Premiere Brazil!", MOMA's annual showcase of current Brazilian filmmaking, The Man Who Bottled... More >>

• Director Wayne Price's The Doorman

  published July 16, 2008

  In The Doorman, director Wayne Price uses documentary techniques, including a pitch meeting with his actual producer, to suggest that... More >>

• La Rivière Gentille

  published July 9, 2008

  The most recent of three documentaries screening in anticipation of the career retrospective of French artist Louise Bourgeois, which comes to the... More >>

• Achim Bornhak's Exasperating Eight Miles High

  published July 9, 2008

  Groupie Uschi ("ooh-she") Obermaier has a name that's fun to say and a youth that reads like it was even more fun to live, but Eight Miles... More >>

• T. Sean Shannon's Harold

  published July 9, 2008

  The long stretches of dead air that, it can only be assumed, were supposed to be filled by laughter provide ample time for pondering what audience... More >>

• Very Young Girls Shows Something Worse Than Criminal

  published July 2, 2008

  Rachel Lloyd's accent is a study in transition: Neither the chewy drawl of her native Portsmouth nor the clipped patois of her adopted... More >>

• Beauty in Trouble: Soapy Realism

  published June 10, 2008

  The center of Beauty in Trouble, Czech director Jan Hrebejk's trying foray into soapy realism, is the kind of provincial, hard-luck lass... More >>

• Directors' Fortnight: An Alt-Cannes

  published June 10, 2008

  The Directors' Fortnight festival originated as a kind of enfant de resistance, born as it was in the supremely French spirit of protest... More >>

• Rebellion Gives Way in The Grocer's Son

  published June 3, 2008

  Director Eric Guirado's The Grocer's Son is a small, self-assured film that moves at its own pace, always staying one graceful step... More >>

• RFK Must Die: Conspiracy Queries

  published June 3, 2008

  Exploring several of the inconsistencies in the official account of the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy without stating an alternative... More >>