Imagine, if you will, God. Imagine that He has done everything to protect His people, and then one day, without warning, He leaves. After five years, He returns, only to find that not only have the people survived without Him, they have thrived, and now that He is back, they realize that for all the […]

I have never before felt so thankless in writing a review – I come to praise the merits of one of the greatest films of this decade, in the full knowledge that most of my readers will never have the chance to see it, let alone the inclination. I refer to Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s […]

I should hasten to say that I don’t think Wordplay is an undeserving or uninteresting film. I don’t think that’s the case. But it is one of my weaknesses that I don’t really know how to talk about documentaries in any reasonably smart way. I haven’t seen that many (not even Spellbound, the evident influence […]

Credit where credit is due, The Lake House certainly can’t be faulted for lack of narrative ambition. What it can and should be faulted for is being utterly fucking insane. There’s just no other way to put it. The plot…but why do I even bring up the plot? I am not entirely certain that I […]

Do you like Jack Black? A lot? Then you’ll probably like Nacho Libre. For myself, I like Jack Black, and I enjoyed the film as a divertimento, but not really much else. It’s a summer comedy, which means that you’ve more or less forgotten it by the time you leave the theater, sooner if like […]

“I kind of liked The Break-Up, but it’s because I’m a chick,” a female friend recently informed me. I don’t see how that could possibly help. A film whose plot is right there in the title, The Break-Up is one of the most pointless films I’ve seen in a long time. Gary (Vince Vaughn) and […]

Author’s note: I was a romantic 24-year-old and it seemed like Altman was going to die soon – he did – so please just ignore that utterly deranged 10/10, 5/5 score. I stand by the rest of it, mostly. The first scene in Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion consists solely of […]

Reports of Pixar’s demise have been exaggerated, although perhaps not greatly. You’ve probably heard by now that Cars is the least of the seven feature films produced by that animation studio. I’m not going to dispute that. However, given the enormous quality of the six films Pixar made between 1995’s Toy Story and 2004’s The […]

Oh my god, it’s finally not an agony to post. And look at me, being all “hugely busy at work,” so I just now find out. The June Plan has its first casualty – that is, the first film I would probably not have seen without the extra bump of motivation (that I saw The […]

The new version of The Omen is not a shot-for-shot remake of the original. It is a line-for-line remake in many places, which makes me wonder something: the script is credited to David Seltzer, who wrote the 1976 film. But it’s not very hard to imagine that it is in fact the same exact script, […]

Sometime around 1998, Luc Besson kind of stopped being a filmmaker and turned into a brand name. It was that year that he wrote and produced Taxi, the first significant and successful “Luc Besson film” that he didn’t also direct. Now he writes three or four films a year, and produces several more, making him […]

An Incovenient Truth is not really a very good film. There are monologue films that are brilliantly-done works of cinema; Spaudling Gray’s masterpieces Swimming to Cambodia (directed by Jonathan Demme) and Gray’s Anatomy (directed by Steven Soderbergh) leap to mind as examples of one man talking for 90 minutes, done as a thrilling stylistic exercise. […]