Disney ~ Brother Bear
The surreal visions of the Brothers Quay, identical-twin animators from Minnesota who have since made London their home, are an offbeat mix of clockwork mechanics, wire, thread, and 19th-century curios, all set to life in a series of beautiful but elusive set pieces. Directed in a highly stylized manner, with a shallow plane of focus that intentionally keeps certain objects blurred and a camera…
There was such a magic on the screen in 1995 when the people at Pixar came up with the first fully computer-animated film, Toy Story. Their second feature film, A Bug's Life, may miss the bull's-eye but Pixar's target is so lofty, it's hard to find the film anything less than irresistible. Brighter and more colorful than the other animated insect movie of 1998 (Antz), A Bug's Life is the s…
BUSTER KEATON COLLECTION, THE
By Brakhage: An Anthology, Vol. 1 (The Criterion Collection)
A milestone of the silent film era and one of the first "art films" to gain international acclaim, this eerie German classic from 1919 remains the most prominent example of German expressionism in the emerging art of the cinema. Stylistically, the look of the film's painted sets--distorted perspectives, sharp angles, twisted architecture--was designed to reflect (or express) the splintered psyc…