He’s hardly my favorite director, living or dead, but I cede to no one in my ardor as a Steven Spielberg apologist. Even when his films are flawed or simply flat-out bad, I think there’s something interesting to dig at, and besides the man is one of the most internally-coherent auteurs working in America. Thus, […]

Memoirs of a Geisha is so, so pretty. The cinematography by Dion Beebe is just about as good as I’ve seen all year, not because it is radical but because it is so winningly conservative: all soft light across faces, silhouettes, lovely color combinations (bright pink cherry blossoms against delicate green bushes in one scene…heavenly). […]

The key shot in Brokeback Mountain comes early in the film, before the two ill-fated lovers ever act on their impulses, or indeed before one of them even realizes that he has such an impulse. Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), one of two 19 year-old men tending sheep on a Wyoming mountain, is bathing himself […]

Throwing my lot in with those who would have all American cinema reduced to feel-good morally upright Falwell friendly tubthumping, I spent money to see an opening-weekend screening of the ungainly-named The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I tease, a bit. Because it’s not really all that religious. Which is […]

On one level, I hate to ask, “did we really need another Pride and Prejudice?” Need or no, we have another one, so that’s a fairly futile question. But what’s scary is that the answer is a qualified “yes.” The plot, quickly, for those who have somehow managed to avoid reading it: Elizabeth Bennett is […]