Surprise, surprise, the best film I’ve seen in a theater this year – hell, maybe this decade – isn’t American. And it isn’t new. Point in fact, it’s making it’s US premiere a shocking thirty-seven years after it was first produced. I speak of Army of Shadows [L’Armée des Ombres], the 11th of the 13 […]
Author’s note, June 2016: I was much too kind on this one. Few reviews from the first year of this site’s lifespan have caused me more subsequent problems than the 2.5/5 I gave this movie – 2/5 would be much closer to the mark, maybe even 1.5/5 if I was feeling especially feisty. When last […]
A question for the ages: is it preferable to see a perfunctory and dull Hollywood blockbuster whose every movie eminently predictable, or an edgy little indie that doesn’t play by any rules and goes wildly off the rails at the end, turning into an unwatchable mess? I don’t know if I can answer that. I’d […]
Adaptating a book into a movie must be a tricky thing at the best of times. If we can safely assume that a book’s printedness is a part of what it is (and I see no reason not to so assume), what gets lost, and what added, in the translation from print to screen? The […]
A mini-commentary on remake mentality: If you spend enough time around people who don’t know all that much about the film industry, one of the complaints you hear a lot is the question, “why do they always have to remake movies? Don’t they have any new ideas?” To the second of these, I can only […]
For all that I bitch about the tedious movies that I see these days, I do live just one short el ride from the second-best art movie market in North America. Sure, a lot of what gets into art theatres is crap nowadays, but lo and behold I actually saw something like a masterpiece on […]
Director Terry Zwigoff knows how to do artists; we know this from Crumb. And he knows how to do Daniel Clowes adaptations; we know this from Ghost World. So I’m at a loss to explain how Art School Confidential, which by every possible indication ought to have been a slam-dunk, ended up being so empty-headed. […]
They tell me that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was specifically designed to be a wuxia film for a Western audience. Mission accomplished. Because while I’ve seen a fair number of films from that genre at this point, not one of them has come close to equalling CTHD in my esteem. Part of the problem, I […]
Philip Seymour Hoffman is a great actor, and here’s the proof: Mission: Impossible III is an interesting movie when he’s onscreen. Hoffman plays Owen Davian, who is evil. Davian wants to take control of the “Rabbit’s Foot” a MacGuffin of biohazardous origin. Standing in his way is Ethan Hunt, played by Tom Cruise, the media […]
Proof yet again that nothing good comes out of Sundance anymore: David Slade’s monumentally unpleasant Hard Candy. I saw the poster first in January. “Holy shit!” I thought, “that’s one hell of an image! I have no idea what the film is about, but the Little Red Riding Hood imagery? Brilliant!” Well, the little red […]
A cute, if extremely simple and even regressive movie, Kinky Boots has one and only one reason to exist, and that is Chiwetel Ejiofor. Which turns out not to be a bad reason. (By the way: chew’-i-tell edge’-oh-for). Ejiofor plays Lola, a London drag queen who has a chance meeting with a tweedy little Northamptonite […]
A little over a week ago, I finally got around to watching the 1978 BBC miniseries Pennies from Heaven, directed by Piers Haggard and written by one of the greatest dramatists in television history, Dennis Potter. Forcing myself to spread the six episodes out, I finished it not that long ago, and I think I’m […]
