I will not defend Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight as a documentary. On that count, I am not at all sure it is not a failure; not because it is agitprop, like Fahrenheit 9/11 (although it is), but because I do not know that it is entirely as rigorous as it needs to be in […]

I thought about never admitting it to anybody. Just keeping it a secret, and know that I did it, and make sure that nobody found out, because I deserved nothing but the hatred of every living man, woman and child for what I had done. But I couldn’t. That’s not what this weblog is for. […]

The concert genre is always going to suffer from the reality that Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz perfected the form in 1978 just as it essentially created it. But in the hands of a great, or at least passionate filmmaker, there still joy to be had from the concert film. Witness Neil Young: Heart of […]

In which 63 year-old Harrison Ford tries to remind us that twenty years ago, he was a viable action star. I have no idea what he was trying to achieve in making Firewall, but he failed. The plot is color-by-numbers without the color: a bank company’s security director (Ford) sees his family kidnapped by an […]

Michael Winterbottom is one of those directors whose career is so varied that it can be easy to lose sight of him beneath his films. But his work is always at least interesting, and never more so than with Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, adapted sort of from Laurence Sterne’s aggressively unfilmable novel. […]

I can think of three ways to enjoy the experience of watching a film: 1. It is a good film 2. It is an exemplar of it’s genre (the “I just go to be entertained” reason) 3. It is so garishly incompetent as to be campy and amusing, allowing the viewer to reflect on her/his […]

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada does many things very well, to the degree that I feel bad I have some complaints. It stars Tommy Lee Jones in his directorial debut, as a ranch hand who fulfills a promise he made to his now-dead friend (Julio Cesar Cedillo) by taking his body back to Mexico […]