Cronenberg Blogathon: Eastern Promises (2007)

by Jake Cole

[Jake Cole is the prolific author of Not Just Movies, a site which I predict will become one of the must-read film blogs in the near future.]

David Cronenberg's movies, to boil them down to their simplest essence, are about identity. In his old body horror masterpieces, The Fly and Videodrome, the Canadian director deconstructed identity via physical dissolution, stripping away literal flesh to show mental breakdowns. Dead Ringers, with its conjoined twins unsure how to operate once separated from each other, visualized a split personality in a manner that even Brian De Palma couldn't have dreamed up when he tread similar waters with Sisters. So fascinated is he by the nature of identity that a director then known for gross-out horror could be the perfect choice to direct an adaptation of M. Butterfly, a play about bent gender, sexual confusion, and national and ethnic clashes.

Cronenberg Blogathon: Hearing Cronenberg - Eastern Promises

Howard Shore

by Jeffrey Goodman

[Jeffrey Goodman is an independent filmmaker who directed Tom Sizemore and Sasha Alexander in the wonderful neo-noir, The Last Lullaby. You can read about his exeriences making films at his blog, The Last Lullaby (and) Peril.]

Have you heard the most recent David Cronenberg film? I bet not. You’ve probably only seen it. But it’s worth hearing, too, as I would place Cronenberg in a very small of group of directors that think about the sound in their work as much as they do the visuals.

Working with Howard Shore for the twelfth time in Eastern Promises, Cronenberg once again proves that he and Shore have one of the most important director/composer collaborations in all of cinema. Their only contemporaries that even challenge them, in my mind, are the Coens/Carter Burwell, David Lynch/Angelo Badalementi, and perhaps Tim Burton/Danny Elfman.

The Best Films of the 00s: 2007

by Tony Dayoub

2007 gave us one of the best years in American film in quite some time. Perhaps it is because so many of these films recall the second golden age in American cinema, the Seventies. Homages to Altman, Friedkin, Kubrick, Malick, Pakula, and Peckinpah are represented on the list. One master who had his most fruitful period in that decade even has a film that shows up on the list. Some reminders: I cannot judge movies I haven't seen, so if you feel a film you like was unjustly left out, it might be that I haven't seen it; also, if I already wrote a review for it, I'll include a link back to the original review.

Now, in alphabetical order, the ten best films of 2007...