Maybe I’m just desperate for any port in a storm, but I actually enjoyed How She Move, the latest in the usually benighted urban dance genre. This is, after all, the filmmaking tradition that gave the world masterpieces from Breakin’ to Step Up, and precious damn little in between that didn’t hit about that same […]
I am certain that I saw Untraceable. I have the ticket stub right here, so I know I paid for it, and I can recall a couple of scenes that weren’t in the trailer. But the film itself just shot right through my brain without leaving more than a ghost in my memory. And that […]
In the 1980s and into the 1990s, one of the most durable genres in the American cinema was the Big Dumb Fun action movie, empty-calorie exercises in elaborate setpieces and corny one-liners. We still have action movies, of course, and they’re still Big and Dumb, but very few of them are any Fun. I blame […]
The film that made an international success out of Mike Leigh begins with what I genuinely believe to be the most terrifying opening shot I have ever seen. As we hear a woman moaning in either pain or ecstasy, the handheld camera moves down a dark alley, shaking like an there’s earthquake, and it stops […]
The life of a dedicated Woody Allen apologist has gotten harder lately, and this is, ironically enough, because he finally came out with a really great film not that long ago. Back in 2002, when the recent examples of “good” Allen were Deconstructing Harry and Sweet and Lowdown, it was not so very hard to […]
As I put it walking out of the theater: “It combines my two favorite things – animation and French cinema. How can I not love it?” Thus is Persepolis, adapted from children’s book author/illustrator Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir, a book that is not, perhaps, my third favorite thing, but certainly something that I like quite […]
Whatever else is true of Cloverfield, I must give J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves credit for making one of the few films to use 9/11 imagery in an effective and appropriate way. It is entirely possible that the last time I saw a film that played a similar card without coming across as exploitive or […]
I am here to inform these modern times of the grammatical era’s end and the beginning of flamboyance especially in cinema. -Joseph Balsamo (Daniel Pommereulle) Fin de conte Fin de cinema -Closing title card It feels more than a little bit facile to write about Week End, which like all of Jean-Luc Godard’s films is […]
Considering Rob Reiner’s output lately (twelve years since The American President, his last decent film), it’s tempting to call The Bucket List a triumph, if only on the grounds that it’s not awful. The problem is that it isn’t any good either, which can be blamed squarely on the two protagonists, who at no moment […]
After the Second World War, John Ford’s relationship with 20th Century Fox was at its low ebb; the director had never been more than tersely professional with studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck, and the latter man’s interference with Ford’s 1946 My Darling Clementine led to an insoluble break between the two. Ford would only shoot […]
The Antagony & Ecstasy John Ford Marathon continues as promised with a foray into a pair of the director’s stranger exercises. In this case, the pairing of one of Hollywood’s hottest directors, who had in March of 1936 won his first Best Director Oscar for The Informer, with the biggest star at 20th Century Fox. […]
Most of us who are out of our teens can probably agree that, although some extremely good movies are made in the modern day, all but the very best simply can’t compete with the films of the past. Especially in America, where even the “art film” is a marketable genre rather than an indicator of […]
