God only knows why Steven Spielberg is so hellbent on making an action hero out of Shia LaBeouf, but with Transformers, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and now Eagle Eye, every single film that he’s produced or directed in the last two years has featured LaBeouf running from or through massive […]
The late Imamura Shohei is the kind of filmmaker who is too easily described as underrated, in spite of the evidence. The fact is, Imamura is very well-rated indeed; he’s quite probably the internationally best-known Japanese director of his generation. But for those of us who love his work, it doesn’t seem right that he […]
First things first. The most unique thing, by far, about the sweetly minor comedy Ghost Town comes during the opening credits: for this is where we find that the film joins the exceedingly rarefied company of Films That Could Afford To Have A Beatles Song On The Soundtrack (this comes at a cost; there are […]
Man, remember when a Neil LaBute film meant something? Not always something good, but that was all part of the point. You take your In the Company of Men, for example, which really was an outrageous firebomb in the indie film world of 1997, inciting arguments both for and against its rampaging misanthropy and misogyny, […]
Most of the conversation surrounding the alleged controversy of Towelhead, suburban satirist Alan Ball’s feature directorial debut, has centered on the question of whether it is exploitative in its depiction of a young Arab-American girl’s sexual awakening, with the common sentiment that Ball didn’t realise how murky the waters that he was treading. Nonsense, I […]
The latest thriller from Claude Chabrol, the “French Hitchcock”,* suffers a bit from being remarkably unthrilling for about 95 of its 115 minutes, although by the time it gets that far I don’t suspect that most people will care all that much: being, as it is a Chabrol film, the genre mechanics aren’t nearly as […]
Those Eastern Europeans and their black comedies! Would anyone else think to open a film as Jiří Menzel’s 1966 Closely Watched Trains opens, with a slacker protagonist recalling how his forebears all spent their lives doing the least work possible, and how their violent deaths came about? I guarantee you have never laughed so hard […]
While watching Sukiyaki Western Django, I was palpably aware that I ought to be enjoying it a great deal more than I was. It’s a genre-bending exercise! In the shape of a western! It has garish colors and style to burn! And comically excessive gore! And a really hokey central gimmick that stampedes straight into […]
I find it gratifying, that the remake of The Women opened the same weekend as Righteous Kill, for this provides us with a marvelous snapshot of the contempt with which the great Hollywood marketing beast divides its audience into gender roles; at least I assume that nobody will have much issue with my argument that […]
The traditional definition in cinema of pornography versus mere trashy exploitation is roughly this: if there’s nudity or sex in the first five minutes, it’s exploitation. Porno directors know that they have to seduce you a bit. By that yardstick, Righteous Kill is exploitative, not pornographic. The argument could be made that it’s neither of […]
Settle in, dear reader, for one of the biggest and splashiest epics that Hollywood ever produced, the story of Judah Ben-Hur, prince of Judea, whose family and fortune were stolen away, who became a galley slave before rescuing a rich Roman and becoming a child of privilege in the wealthiest society in the world, who […]
I’d dearly love to spring out with the ol’ contrarianism and declare Burn After Reading to be a better film than No Country for Old Men, but I really don’t believe I can defend that argument. So instead, let me just stick to the easy praise: Burn After Reading is easily the funniest film by […]
