When Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles was released this summer, you could practically hear the sigh of relief from cinephiles like myself: at last, “our” Zhang was back, the Zhang who made tiny small scale dramas of domesticity and relative intimacy, the Zhang seemingly in abeyance after a brace of colossal wuxia […]
And now we come to 2006’s requisite “film that everybody already has an opinion about because it’s been so very thoroughly written about, thank you Oscar-pimping media”: Dreamgirls. First things first: you’ve heard right. Jennifer Hudson’s performance of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” at the midpoint is beyond phenomenal. Once upon a […]
When we think of great writer/director/actors, most of us, I hope, will come up with names like Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Charles Chaplin, Jacques Tati. I think most of us will not think of Sylvester Stallone. And while Rocky Balboa won’t convince anybody to add his name to the extremely short list of supremely talented […]
A feel-good Christmastime movie titled The Pursuit of Happyness is sort of obligated to be at all pleasant to watch, and that is the first compliment that I will pay to the film: it’s bravely anti-commercial in its willingness – hell, its eagerness – to wallow in the dark places of American capitalism, the poverty […]
Author’s note: this review was originally submitted to and rejected by a certain alt-weekly of my community. If it seems like it lacks the editorial joie de vivre of my customary work, that is doubtlessly why. The most apparent reason for Steven Soderbergh’s moderately confusing The Good German to exist is that of style, a […]
“Le film, c’est le monde. Vraiment, en une heure et demi, en une heure quarante, voir le monde.” -Jean-Luc Godard [“The film is the world. Truly, in an hour and a half, you see the world,”] In the opening moments of Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au hasard Balthazar* something remarkable happens that sets the tone […]
The Good Shepherd is a movie like finest crystal: it is breathtaking and gorgeous and made by skilled craftsmen, but it falls into tiny useless pieces the instant you give it a good whack. Was that an overly precious metaphor? God, it totally was. And kind of useless. Nobody whacks crystal. And obviously, nobody gave […]
The British, they do know how to romp. That’s all The History Boys is, really: a romp, a frolic, just a bit of fun to fill the time between here and there. There’s a healthy bit about growing up, and adolescent sexuality, and a great huge pile about the changing face of teaching, but it’s […]
In the mid-1950’s, Orson Welles – once the Brightest Young Thing in Hollywood – found himself begging for scraps among the film producers of Europe. This is all well-known, and not worth repeating. What matters is that there came a time when Welles began shopping around an idea for a story about a shadowy man […]
(Yeah, I promised this would be up yesterday. Anyone willing to come to Evanston and help me bake 10 batches of cookies before Friday has freedom to complain). Previously: Mel Gibson disappointed me with the degree to which Apocalypto wasn’t batshit insane. It takes approximately no searching whatsoever to find the conventional wisdom that Blood […]
I’m not going to lie: for all my honest arguments in favor of Mel Gibson’s skill as a craftsman, my actual reason for seeing Apocalypto was because I wanted to bask in the crazy. An anti-Semitic homophobe making a film about how the Mayans got what was coming to them? A splendid time is guaranteed […]
I almost couldn’t bring myself to review Fast Food Nation at all, for not only is it nearly at the end of its tenure in America’s art theatres, it’s just plain mediocre, and mediocre movies are hard to write about and boring to read about. But it’s also a movie by Richard Linklater who I […]
