Edward Zwick might be the most consistent director in the history of cinema. His modus operandi: take a little-known but inspiring historical event – failing that, invent one – and falteringly turn it into a lumpy action film lousy with good intentions and lousier with clumsy execution. I honestly feel a bit bad for the […]
Little things, insignificant things, can derail a movie. We can pretend to be as serious and objective as we like, but sometimes there’s just a tiny flaw that wrecks it all, entirely for matters of personal taste. In The Reader, there’s a scene set in Germany in 1958, in which 15-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross) […]
There is not one moment in Last Chance Harvey that is remotely surprising, not a single extraordinary shot, not a line of dialogue that resonates in your soul hours after leaving the theater, not even a musical cue that you hum as you walk out. It is by a fair margin and according to every […]
For the 52nd and final review in my yearlong journey through the They Shoot Pictures Top 1000, I decided it was time to shake things up a bit. Inscrutable art films and dreary social dramas are all right, but we’re going out with a bang: a nasty, occasionally sleazy British gangster picture starring a young […]
Revolutionary Road is a bit familiar: a married couple lives in suburban hellscape, and watches with detached horror as their hopes and ambitions are slowly butchered. And it’s not just that this is a played-out theme: it’s not even the first of director Sam Mendes’s films on the idea. It was just nine years ago […]
Tonight, a lump of coal for Christmas. And by God, this disappointment hurt, more than just about any other disappointing movie I’ve seen in this whole goddamnable year of underachieving cinema. Not that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a particularly bad film – it’s resolutely middle-of-the-road, taken all in all – but its […]
This is a very “based in 2008” review, especially in the opening grafs, but I’m sticking with it. Apologies. I’ve wanted to write this for a long time, but there was never a perfect excuse to do it before now. Clint Eastwood, regarded as something of a master of cinema by many (not all!) traditional […]
The producers of the new Will Smith awards-bait vehicle Seven Pounds would like it very, very much if you’d go ahead and think of their film as a mystery, despite the fact that only the most morbidly inattentive viewer could possibly fail to figure out virtually every twist in the story from details supplied in […]
The leading face in contemporary Iranian cinema, director Abbas Kiarostami can hardly be accused of making accessible, obvious films. Nor does his wonderful 1999 film The Wind Will Carry Us even count as his easiest work, though with its inexpressibly dry, absurdist sense of humor, it’s possibly his most entertaining, given a flexible definition of […]
The buzz on Matteo Garrone’s mafia epic Gomorrah was more than any movie could really hope to stand up against (Martin Scorsese: “Best mob movie ever!”*), but even if it’s no timeless masterpiece, there’s still quite a lot to love in its panoramic, ensemble-based view of a Neapolitan crime syndicate, a depiction close enough to […]
As a director, Ron Howard is wholly in thrall of his scripts. A good story, with good characters, and an appealing structure? That gives us Apollo 13. None of those things? Helloooooo, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! And a whole mess of movies in between of all sorts of varying quality levels, although I feel […]
Ordinarily, I’d say we should all be mortally offended by The Day the Earth Stood Still, director Scott Derrickson’s remake of Robert Wise’s 1951 masterpiece, one of the very finest of all 1950s American films. We’re not supposed to stand for shit like that, or something along those lines. But after wave upon wave of […]
