I really do think that in about ten years or so, we’ll all have a good chance to reevaulate Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, Albert Brooks’s admirable and monstrously flawed attempt to show that we’re all not so different, after all. Because it’s really two movies: one is a film about narcissism, culture […]

Back in the day, movies used to be bad. I mean, really fucking terrible. But these days (since the mid-90’s), everything has become so studio-hacked to death, with test audiences and market research and such, that just as the heights of the best films has dropped, so has the bottom of the worst films risen […]

A year from now, when I am putting together my list of the great films of 2006, near the top of the list you can surely expect to find Hostel, Quentin Tarantino’s Eli Roth’s delicious satire of innocents abroad, a social farce as wry and pointed as the best work of Evelyn Waugh or Oscar […]

Over the weekend, I managed to catch Michael Haneke’s Caché, nominally a thriller, and quite the darling at Cannes. When I first saw it, I failed entirely to understand why it’s been receiving so much adulation, although as I’ve considered the film I find that it yields increasing rewards. It is frustrating in many respects […]

I’m only a little bit ashamed to admit that my primary motivation in seeing the final Merchant Ivory production, The White Countess, was the knowledge that producer Ismail Merchant is dead. I’ve seen only one of his previous films with James Ivory, and I liked it well enough, but I’ve always been a bit scared […]

Breakfast on Pluto far exceeded my expectations, leaving me in the awkward position of expressing a considerable degree of enthusiasm for a movie that, in the cold light of day, doesn’t do much of anything. It’s the story of an orphaned boy named Patrick, living in a small Irish town in the home of a […]

The problem with Match Point is that I can’t think of any angle to approach the film that doesn’t necessarily involve discussing the final act, and it would do a pronounced disservice to the film for me to spoil it. The problem is that it leaves me unable to say anything but generalities. There’s been […]