The jellyfish does not swim, but instead drifts through the ocean on the currents, gently moving through the waves with no aim other than to encounter its food as it floats. So too does the charming and sensitive Israeli film Jellyfish, the 2007 winner of the Cannes Camera d’Or, drift without much in the way […]
Stanley Kubrick once said, “The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about six hundred people who don’t,” which is actually a pretty fair criticism if you stop and think about it. By the same token, we might call the exhausting 1985 documentary Shoah a movie about a few dozen […]
The question everyone has been trying to answer in regards to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – does it live up to the classic Indiana Jones films? – is inapt. Viewed with our objective caps on, neither Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom nor Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade […]
Two and a half years ago, the world was treated to a supremely adequate adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe plagued by both a screenplay so helplessly faithful to the source material that it seriously raised the question of what need the movie satisfied at all, and the barbarically efficient, […]
One of the chief pleasures of blogging is that you get to set your own rules. Which means, for example, that if I want to take my weekly classic movie review to shill for a new DVD release, then I can damn well do so. Specifically, I’d like to take a moment to talk about […]
Though only a fitfully entertaining romantic comedy and often not even that, What Happens in Vegas is better by a fair margin than anybody could have expected it to be. Which I use as code for “it stars Ashton Kutcher, yet it is not hopelessly bad.” Nor, for that matter, is Kutcher himself hopelessly bad. […]
I was very excited to see what writer-director David Mamet had in store for us in Redbelt, his first film to be released after he stopped being a brain-dead liberal. Would it be an impassioned defense of privatized health care? A serious look at the need to bomb all Arabs into the Stone Age to […]
Helen Hunt presents Helen Hunt in a Helen Hunt film by Helen Hunt, and the result is…not as brain-scrapingly awful as it might have been, honestly. Not that there is any universe in which Then She Found Me counts as an artistic success, but in this universe, at least, it certainly isn’t the nightmare of […]
Errol Morris, long one of the most distinctive stylists in the world of documentary filmmaking, has finally done something I never expected him to do: he’s allowed his style to trump all substance, releasing his first unnecessary film. In the past, Morris has made quite a name for himself as a chronicler of the offbeat […]
The inexplicably non-Marine-related concept behind Made of Honor – that Patrick Dempsey’s very bestest friend ever would ask him to be her “maid” of honor just at the very same exact time that he finally realised after ten years that he was totally in love with her – was already horrifying in its way. The […]
“And then he looked around him again, at the big hotel room, the almost untouched tray of liquor, and back at Newton, reclining in bed. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to believe. To sit in this room and believe that I’m talking to a man from another planet.’ “‘Yes,’ Newton said, ‘I’ve thought that […]
Full disclosure: one of the associate producers of this film is a friend of mine from college. Once, he directed a movie that I production designed. Now he’s a Hollywood executive and I blog. I’ll try to keep my spittle-flecked jealousy from spilling into the review. Iron Man is a film straddling a knife’s edge […]
