The word “pretentious” gets batted around a lot by people who don’t use it correctly. It does not mean, “This work of art requires that you think a lot, and it probably isn’t much fun to watch it, so only arrogant people and posers will claim to like it.” It means, “This work of art […]
The estimable comic talents of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are no match for the mighty force of Commercial Filmmaking. This is, at any rate, my chief response to Baby Mama, which drops those two in a gender-specific takeoff on The Odd Couple and proceeds to strangle everything about that idea that you’d want to […]
It is sometimes the case that a movie opens with a moment so perfect that you just know that no matter what happens, it is going to own you body and soul. Such is the case with Georges Franju’s extraordinarily influential horror film Eyes Without a Face, which opens with a musical theme that sounds […]
88 Minutes is Al Pacino’s worst film ever. I’ve given that sentence its own paragraph, to make sure it sinks in all the way. In fact, I’ll do so again: 88 Minutes is Al Pacino’s worst film. Ever. In this particular film, Pacino plays Dr. Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist whose testimony was instrumental in […]
Gonzo documentarian extraordinaire Morgan Spurlock has answered one of the pressing question of our age: the best way to explore the modern face of Islam and Middle East is not by reducing those topics to a video game. This is exactly the tack that Spurlock uses in Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, […]
I think it’s fair to argue that Wong Kar-Wai makes the most distinctive films in the history of narrative cinema. So to call My Blueberry Nights a Wong Kar-Wai film is a fair bit of description all by itself. On the other hand, My Blueberry Nights is also, by a pretty healthy margin, the worst […]
Forgetting Sarah Marshall has become instantly famous for one of the most dubious reasons I can imagine: the lead actor Jason Segel, who is un-coincidentally also the screenwriter, goes full-frontal in one of the film’s first scenes. Setting aside that fact that there have in fact been penises in movies before – why, just last […]
Before it ends, director Tom McCarthy’s sophomore film The Visitor ends up going to some fairly ambitious places, and for the most part it does right by its ambition; but it’s always at its best in the very small moments where it’s not concerned with anything larger than the thoughts and behaviors of people. It […]
Blame it on a lack of sleep or whatever you like, but at around 3:00 AM, when I finished this review, I somehow failed to publish it. I think you will find it not worth the wait. At first, it seems that El Topo will be a fairly standard narrative film, albeit one made by […]
As it commonly happens in regards to the Italian horror industry, history is confused on exactly how the fourth “official” Zombi film came to be. The facts are these: Claudio Fragasso had somehow convinced the good folks at Flora Film to put him in charge of a zombie picture right around the same time that […]
My Brother Is an Only Child was co-written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, whose best-known previous work in America was the massive The Best of Youth, and possessing that knowledge colors one’s response to the new film, directed and co-written by Daniele Luchetti. Because once that connection has been made, it’s almost impossible not […]
Smart People isn’t really a good movie, and nothing I can say can change that fact. This is particularly galling, because I actually liked Smart People, and liking movies that I can tell aren’t very good always leaves me feeling like I’m easy to manipulate. My lack of critical strength notwithstanding, it’s a film that […]
