Reasonable people can disagree on the level to which Stephen King’s writings have been well-served by the cinema, but I think it’s not going to be controversial if I suggest that whether your list of “Great Stephen King Movies” is long or very short, it is extremely likely that The Shawshank Redemption is very near […]

I hope you’ll bear with me if I feel the need to declare this a first draft review of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There. What the film needs, I think, is plenty of time to digest, and a second viewing; I haven’t had the first and I’m not going to have the second, in all […]

It’s a weird thing to praise a person for, but with his fifth feature film, Noah Baumbach has become America’s preeminent cinematic misanthrope. I mean this as a compliment – art needs misanthropy, someone to act as a corrective to all of the lumpy humanism out there, if it is done well and honestly. With […]

Even if it had nothing else to recommend it, I would have to stand in respectful awe of the way that Enchanted manages to have it both ways: on the one hand, it’s a post-modern reduction of the prototypical Disney fairy tale that cuts into its target with a merciless precision that the increasingly glum […]

There’s no way around it – Brian De Palma’s new Iraq film Redacted is a complete mess by just about any conventional measure – but it is also as great a proof as I’ve ever seen that a movie can be a complete wreck and still be totally compelling. In fact, it might well be […]

All narrative art forms are not created equal, or: I’m not sure there was ever a chance that Love in the Time of Cholera was going to be made into a good movie. At least, not without fundamentally altering the source material such that what was left over would hardly count as the same material. […]

OH MY GOD, THE FACES. Or, I think this is as good a time as any to ask a question that clearly hasn’t been asked recently: just because we have all of these wonderful toys in modern filmmaking, that doesn’t mean we have to use all of them. Take for instance motion capture CGI. Is […]

The first thing that everyone knows about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1980 adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz is that it is long, one of the longest narrative films ever made, clocking in at more than 15 hours (more than 15.5 in the American, NTSC version). Everyone knows this because it is not an […]

Here is the plot of Dan in Real Life: Dan Burns (Steve Carell), a widowed advice columnist living in New Jersey travels one autumn to be with his parents and siblings and siblings’ spouses and children, dragging along his three daughters – ages 17, 15 and 9 – all of whom have some particular reason […]

When I was choosing the poster to add to this review, I had a choice to make: “Which better sums up the movie,” I asked myself, “the one where Vince Vaughn looks like a smug dick, or the one where he is acting oppressively & unamusingly zany?” I picked, well, it’s right over there. The […]

Robert Redford’s first overtly political film as a director, Lions for Lambs was made with what I am certain were the very best of intentions. We all know what road you can make out of good intentions. It’s a great muddle from the word go: the script, by Matthew Michael Carnahan (who debuted earlier this […]

The hype was right. No Country for Old Men is basically flawless. Scrupulously adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, frequently called “minor” on the apparent grounds that it is one of the author’s easiest books to read, the film represents a roaring return for filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen to the mode of their heyday, […]