Our friend Jacob Mertens has posted a review of David Gordon Green’s Joe, which he attended at the South By Southwest Festival in Austin. Joe is also one of the opening night features at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival, and advance tickets for Thursday night’s screening at the Union South Marquee Theater are sold out (rush tickets will be available).
To call Joe anything but a return to form for director David Gordon Green would be a disservice. And that has nothing to do with how terrible his recent spate of films have been . . . For all those who heralded last year’s Prince Avalanche as a modest triumph, I personally found it only a shaky reentry into a fashion of filmmaking the director had once been on the edge of perfecting. Thus we come to the phrase “return to form,” which in this case quite literally places Joe within the aesthetic formal design of Green’s early cinematic triumphs. The film has its shortcomings, sure, but on a whole it reinvigorates the once and future promising career of a fledgling film auteur.
Jacob is currently the Review Editor at Film International, and you can read his full review of Joe at the Film International website. We look forward to hearing more from him when he attends the UW-Madison for graduate studies in the Communication Arts department this Fall.