Film Review: Haywire (2011)

As he hurtles towards 50, the age at which he claims he will retire, or at the very least will take a prolonged break, from film-making, Steven Soderbergh seems intent on burning through as many genres as possible. The already prolific director, who has made 25 feature films in 23 years, will have released three films in the space of twelve months before this year is out, all of which are radically different. Contagion was a stark and bleak look at what could happen in the case of a cataclysmic pandemic, the forthcoming Magic Mike is a comedy about a male stripper played by Channing Tatum, and the recently-released Haywire is an action-thriller that, on the surface at least, seems pretty standard.

Film Review: The Skin I Live In (2011)

Pedro Almodóvar's latest film, The Skin I Live In (La piel quo habito), is a brilliant example of a gearshift movie. For those unfamiliar with the term, it was coined by Paul Thomas Anderson, director of Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, to describe films that start off as one thing, then suddenly change into a completely different kind of movie partway through. (A textbook example of this would be Psycho, which starts off being about a young woman who steals money from her employer, then shifts into something else.) When done well, gearshift movies can be wonderfully unnerving experiences for an audience, as they upend their expectations of where the story was going by sending it off in a completely new direction. They're also almost impossible to review, because you can't discuss the film as a whole without giving too much away.