Presenting 2005’s Music God Biopic of the Year: Walk the Line the story of Johnny Cash’s rise to fame and prominence. Mostly. Actually, there are really two distinct plots running through the film, and one of them works one hell of a lot better than the other. You see, the story of Cash’s rise is […]

Werner Herzog released Lessons of Darkness in 1992, so it’s not fair to complain that he has nothing to say about the second American war in Iraq. But even if he had waited 13 years, I still think he might have avoided anything political; because he certainly didn’t go out of his way to comment […]

A little while ago on this very blog, there was a bit of a dustup over whether Jarhead was sufficiently moralistic in its treatment of the Gulf War, particularly in terms of whether or not it said enough about the relationship between that conflict and our current Middle East imbroglio. In one corner: “What we […]

Noah Baumbach’s dark, self-lacerating The Squid and the Whale is an autobiographical story about the teenaged son of two novelists, who starts out as the clone of his intellectually tyrannical father, and slowly comes to realize that maybe it’s not great to be the kind of person who mocks people for liking A Tale of […]