I really did think I had Dear Mr. Waldman pegged early on. A flashback to a little boy who falls in love with American movies, and loses sight of his own culture as a result? And he has a torturous relationship with his parents? And it was co-produced by notorious Yoram Globus, late of Cannon […]

My only explanation is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hates the Israeli film industry. Thanks to the stringent enforcement of an arbitrary rule involving how much of what language is spoken onscreen, the fairly brilliant comedy The Band’s Visit was rendered ineligible for the arcane Foreign Language Film Oscar, leaving a […]

It’s a bit of a pity that Frances McDormand’s first performance in two years (and the first time she appears to be enjoying herself in much longer) is doomed to be lost in the shadow of Amy Adams’s attempt to prove she’s not a one-hit wonder. This is after all a perilous moment for Adams: […]

“Based on a true story” is such a marvelous bit of hand-waving. In the case of The Bank Job it means, “we are going to try and gloss over some of the more unbelievable elements of our story by making you think it’s all factual.” They needn’t have bothered; true or fake, The Bank Job […]

Throughout the month of March, Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center is presenting a festival of 61 films from the European Union made in the the past couple of years. As time permits, I will be writing short reviews of those films I manage to see at this festival. Director Nick Broomfield’s 25th film in more […]

I feel sorry for Roland Emmerich. No, really, I do. By all rights, he should be a notorious figure if ever there was one, but beyond a vague sense we all share that his movies all pretty much suck, he has no real name recognition. It’s not like the phrase “There’s a new Roland Emmerich […]

A film with few precursors and few successors, The Battle of Algiers practically demands the use of hyperbole, so here I go: this is one of the most unique films in history, freely blending cinéma vérité inspired faux-documentary, psychological profiling, social commentary, Marxist anti-colonialism, horrifying violence, and good old-fashioned raw emotional power that all add […]

Is there anything more hideous than curdled whimsy? That dreadful but sometimes inevitable result of combining quirkiness with cynical cool and idiosyncrasy with irony – how much I hate it, and what it has done to independent cinema in this country! Filmmakers who confuse eccentric behavior and costume with character development, and then try to […]

I hope that all the people who slagged on Elizabeth: The Golden Age have learned their lesson. The Other Boleyn Girl commits most of the same sins as that film, but fails to be so joyfully campy, lacking as it does the same overblown sapphism as Shekhar Kapur’s terrible misfire. Okay, it lacks onscreen sapphism. […]

For an actor famous for making essentially the same movie over and over again, the career of Will Ferrell has been marked by a rather violent fluctuation in the relative quality of his projects. None of them are original; some are still very good, and some kind of suck. I bring this up because somehow […]

Before I start, I need to get this off of my chest: The Counterfeiters is good enough that it very well might have been the best of the five nominees for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Oscars, and that being the case, it’s all the more obnoxious that 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 […]

In retrospect it seems obvious that a film about one of the greatest tragedies of the 1960s youth movement should be explosively inventive and innovative, but years of blandly pandering films aimed squarely at sentimental Boomers have blunted a basic truth: art about radicals needs to be radical itself. While it would be arguing too […]