In Bruges is the first feature-length movie to be written and directed by Martin McDonagh, one of the key English language playwrights of the last 15 years. This leads me to two competing thoughts: -Everything about In Bruges is explained by the fact its creator is based in theater. -Nothing about In Bruges suggests that […]
It doesn’t seem right that there should be “Werner Herzog’s first documentary.” His career ought to have sprung fully-formed. And yet here we are, with Werner Herzog’s first documentary, Land of Silence and Darkness. Or at least it’s his first feature-length documenatry, if we don’t count the sort of documantary-ish visual tone poem Fata Morgana. […]
For all that it is a supremely disposable bit of stoner anti-comedy, Strange Wilderness – the newest film from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions – manages to make cinematic history, in a very limited sort of way: it is to my best knowledge the first film ever to feature both Ernest Borgnine and Joe Don […]
First things first. Last things first, actually. The end credits for Over Her Dead Body do not begin in the ordinary way: the very first words scrolling up after the final fade to black are “A Film By,” and this is followed not by the director’s name, as is customary, but by the cast list. […]
Perhaps I am mistaken, and I hope someone will advise me if I am, but I believe that The Eye makes history as the first in the crazy glut of Asian horror remakes over the last few years to come from a Hong Kong original, the Pang Brothers’ Gin gwai (released in the anglophone world […]
Out of more than 80 films spanning from the silent era to the mid-1950s, Life of Oharu from 1952 was the film of Mizoguchi Kenji’s career – a project that he was so desperate to make that he abandoned the company, Shochiku, where he had worked for years and accepted an extremely small budget from […]
Sometime in the first third of 27 Dresses, the lead character Jane, played by Katherine Heigl, is flipping out over her cute but oblivious boss (as she does fairly constantly for 97 of the film’s 102 minutes, less credits), when the sassy friend character, played by Judy Greer, slaps her hard on the face. “I […]
