Somebody clearly likes Dennis Potter. I am a sucker for aggressively artificial movies, musicals in particular, just to clear the air right away. So I’m well aware that most people aren’t going to like Romance & Cigarettes remotely so much as I did. It’s a wavelength thing, as usual: either you’ll find John Turturro’s free-spirited […]
Above all other things, Lake of Fire is madly ambitious, almost certainly the most overreaching film of 2007. I mean that in a good way. The one accusation we would never want to make of a 152-minute, black-and-white documentary about abortion, is being insufficiently ambitious. Just the bare facts about the film’s production history are […]
I am assured by those who have read the Ian McEwan novel that serves as the source for this year’s chief prestige picture Atonement that it is a master study of humanity: love, weakness, guilt, self-awareness all writhing together on the page in a brilliant work of art. And I’m sure those people are telling […]
Mark your calendars, for I am about to say something that I never, ever say: The Golden Compass has all the ingredients to be a fairly good movie, excepting that it is completely undone by its screenplay. And as long as I’m saying uncharacteristic things, here’s another: The Golden Compass could probably have been salvaged […]
Myths and legend tend to gather around these old Hollywood productions until it’s mostly impossible to know the facts, but here is what’s certain: in 1924, 40-year-old Douglas Fairbanks was in the midst of the run of ’20s swashbucklers that made him one of the biggest movie stars in the world, and as one of […]
Christmas Evil AKA You Better Watch Out (1980, USA) The creator: Writer-director Lewis Jackson, who seemingly made nothing else, ever. The plot: On December 24, 1949, little Harry Stadling is traumatised to see Mommy getting it on with Santa Claus. 31 years later, the Christmas-obsessed Harry (Brandon Maggart), newly promoted to a management position at […]
He certainly didn’t invent the form, but Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine did more than any other film I can name to popularise the growth of a new type of documentary that doesn’t “document” so much as it “argues” – cinematic essays, you might say if you’re nice, position papers on film if you’re not […]
There is a quality to Crispin Glover’s voice that makes it sound like he is smiling every time he talks; but he never does. There is a constant look of intense seriousness on his face at all times, but I do not think this is because he takes himself seriously. I think it is because […]
Outside of cinephiliac circles, it is my suspicion that these days, Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is remembered – when it is remembered at all – largely as “that Dylan Western,” or even “wow, I didn’t know that ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ was from a movie.” And thanks to Todd Haynes and […]
Okay, some turns of phrase suck more than others. But every halfway decent Christmastime horror pun was taken decades ago. Anyway, there is no single calendar day better represented in the annals of horror movies than December 25. Following up on my colossally successful and better-named Summer of Blood, I’ve decided to spend the next […]
