Author’s note, January 2017: I used to have you might call a bug up my butt about this franchise. Let’s say that although I stand by this review, I don’t actually agree with it. In 2002, two similar movies opened, both looking at the aftereffects of a virus that turns people into unstoppable cannibals, what […]
Recall the most unpleasant film you have ever seen. Was it a particularly graphic Holocaust documentary? If not, you have never seen a film nearly as unpleasant as The Devil Came on Horseback. Of course, that is sort of the point. Some facts: in early 2004, former US Marine Brian Steidle took a position in […]
There are films that are great because they treat upon deep human truths with passion and sensitivity. There are films that a great because they engage with the language of filmmaking and broaden the vocabulary of the cinema. Then, there are films that are really rather good, solely because they have a luminescent performance anchoring […]
Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) has just told his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon), over the phone, that their only son has been found dead in a field. She wants to come to New Mexico to see the remains, he wants her to stay in Tennessee (he knows by now that what’s left of their boy […]
When I say that Good Luck Chuck is not quite as funny as losing a testicle to cancer, I am not using hyperbole. At least it’s possible to enjoy gallows humor during chemotherapy; during Good Luck Chuck‘s wretched 100 minutes, I laughed one time, and it wasn’t even a proper laugh, it was one of […]
Update: Thanks to everyone who caught the weird cut-and-paste error in the sixth paragraph. I fucking hate Blogger. Now, I loves me some Jodie Foster, and I loves me some Neil Jordan almost as much. So the general bland badness of their first-ever collaboration, The Brave One, is not just disappointing, it feels like an […]
I was not alive during the 1960s, but that decade has been so thoroughly strip-mined and repackaged that I sometimes wonder if I’ve missed out on anything. But then, I see something like In the Shadow of the Moon, and I am reminded: I missed that. You know, that whole “Space Age” thing. To be […]
Do I feel particularly generous towards Across the Universe because I just watched Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band a few days ago? Unquestionably. But that’s not to say that there isn’t a lot here to love. After all, it is third film by the hallucinatory genius Julie Taymor, whose extraordinary Titus proved that no […]
Nobody likes to call a practically perfect genre film that whirs along with the inerrant precision of a Swiss watch “hackwork,” so let me instead suggest that Eastern Promises continues the evolution begun in Spider and A History of Violence whereby David Cronenberg is redefining himself as an exceptionally gifted director of essentially non-Cronenbergian films. […]
Like Finnegans Wake or The Waste Land, music maven Robert Stigwood’s 1978 epic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is such a vast experience that one does not know how to begin discussing it: each possible thought contests with every other thought, all of them vital, all jousting for primacy. So I suppose I shall […]
On 20 December, 1999, sovereignty of the Portuguese city-state colony of Macau was transferred to the People’s Republic of China. At that time, Macau was a sort of semi-lawless frontier region, and it was for this reason that it makes the ideal setting for Hong Kong director Johnny To and screenwriters Szeto Kam–Yuen and Yip […]
A documentary about video game players doesn’t have the right to be any good, but that doesn’t stop The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. Taking a story that sounds like a bad human interest piece, it turns into an operatic tragicomedy of rivalry, jealousy, failure, and success, a tale of all-too-human men defined […]
