Ah, there’s nothing like a good paranoid political thriller! Hard to say when the genre reached its peak – the ’60s (e.g The Ipcress File), maybe the ’70s (e.g. Three Days of the Condor). Either way, we’ve been in a low place for really smart espionage films for a while, which means that when I […]
There is one particularly great flaw in Warren Beatty’s strange and remarkable Reds that threatens to scuttle the entire film, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to fix it, if only the director hadn’t seemingly viewed it as the raision d’être of the entire project. As the opening credits roll […]
There’s an undeniable post-modern charm to casting Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick, as director George Hickenlooper has done in the feckless biopic Factory Girl: who better to embody Andy Warhol’s hollow Pop muse than an individual famous essentially for being a famous person? Tragically, post-modern charm only carries the film so far before it runs […]
Well, it took him six long months, but Nicolas Cage has finally appeared in something goofier than The Wicker Man. In Ghost Rider, Cage plays Johnny Blaze, a stunt motorcyclist who performs the most dangerous tricks ever seen to cope with the death of his father during a show in Johnny’s youth, the day after […]
I got into a conversation this weekend on the subject: can a Werner Herzog film actually count as a misfire? Even if it’s inscrutable and unsatisfying to watch, that’s probably exactly what Herzog wanted it to be. So even if it’s bad, it’s still a success. I shortly thereafter saw The Wild Blue Yonder, and […]
Allegedly, when Stephen Frears learned that many Americans viewed The Queen – the story of a leader with a profound disconnect from her subjects – as an allegory for the Bush presidency, he was both shocked and a little confused that we’d be so anxious to appropriate a story that, to the director, was so […]
Books are strange things, in a way. We take ownership of them. No matter how popular and well-read a book is, I still feel that it’s my own private experience, and when I find someone who had the same experience with the same book as I, it’s like finding my best friend and soul mate […]
Journey with me to 1935, when sound cinema had not yet ended its first decade of life, and Hollywood was still a home to experimentation and radicalism. When a 41-year-old man, famed for directing Westerns, produced one of the most unique and artistic films in the history of American moviemaking, a film that would be […]
There are a lot of dead bodies in movies, and they are found in many places: murder mysteries, war stories, the criminal underworld, et cetera. One place that they are not typically found is in the center of omnibus films exploring the self-identity of the American woman, and for that alone it’s worth praising The […]
I’m sure part of it is just that I’m coming off of a run of some excessively bad films (AKA: the first 8 months of any given year), but I actually didn’t hate Music and Lyrics. I did not love it, to be certain; I am not going to go around proclaiming that everybody or […]
The Silence of the Lambs, released exactly sixteen years ago today, is almost certainly the finest American film about serial killers, because it’s not “about” serial killers. It’s about Clarice Starling, FBI trainee, and how she stared evil in the face in order to stop another evil. It’s somewhere between a fable and a character […]
I don’t walk out of movies. Period. I even have a hard time stopping a movie on TV. No matter how bad or morally offensive a movie is, I feel that I owe it my full attention for its entire running time. I didn’t walk out of Because I Said So, but I kept my […]
