Pity the biopic. It’s easy – perhaps even obligatory – to criticize a film for being a retread of the same old tired “boy gets fame, boy gets drugs, boy is heartwarmingly redeemed,” but when a film breaks away from that, it turns out to be just as easy to complain that nothing happens. The […]

Ah, the agony of heightened expectations. By no means a “bad” film, L’enfant, the winner of the 2005 Palme d’Or is nonetheless a film I expected to enjoy a great deal more than I did. Indeed, it was this ambivalence that led me to withhold this review for so long (at five days, this was […]

In 1973, George Roy Hill directed a script by David S. Ward, and a genre was invented. The film was The Sting, and it told the story of two con men leading a coalition to pull off a Long Con on the man who murdered their friend. The great innovation of the film was that […]

Never tried to hide the fact that film noir is probably my favorite genre, ever. Three reasons: the first is its unrelenting nihilism; the second is the quality of visual narrative (and just how damn beautiful a good noir looks); the third is the wit of the characters and dialogue. Okay, “wit” maybe overselling it, […]

My continuing quest to see everything now leads me to Take the Lead, a film whose considerable charms would be a great deal easier to appreciate if they weren’t bogged down in grotesque and inconsistent libertarian propaganda. …sorry, wrong film. One of the most consistent genres in cinema history is the “noble liberal teacher who […]

I’m not sure exactly how to talk about Thank You for Smoking, a film specifically and unavoidably about politics that is politically infantile. Yet it seems harsh to take it to task for that, given the degree to which politics are given short shrift in favor of genial comedy. It’s about Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), […]

If you’re the type of person who would enjoy Slither, you likely don’t need me to tell you to see it, because you already know who you are. I don’t mean to absolve my critical responsibilities, but facts are facts, and B-movie fans don’t need to be told, “hey, there’s an awesome new movie about […]