Sometimes, you just have to admit that patterns crop up: this is turning into a winter of perfectly good movies that keep trying to suffocate the absolutely great movie hiding inside. Exactly three weeks ago, we were presented with the sight of Gus Van Sant playing nice for the Academy with the slightly-better-than-routine biopic Milk; […]
I don’t like to say it – for it’s a cliché and an insult to the human capacity to create art – but it’s probably true that John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt shouldn’t have ever been turned into a movie – despite winning every award you could name and just as many that you couldn’t, […]
Steven Soderbergh’s 4.5-hour cinematic study of two years in the life of Che Guevara is absolutely confounding – not least because it’s hard even to figure out how to classify it. An eight-years-in-the-making dream project (financed in no small part by the director’s populist Ocean’s trilogy), the film premiered at the 2008 Cannes festival as […]
Occasionally, I’ll see fit to start out a film review with a personal anecdote, theoretically one that’s entertaining or somehow enlightening. This time, though, the anecdote is the review, after a fashion, for reasons that I do hope become clear and useful by the end. The time: October, 2001. I am a 19-year-old sophomore in […]
As mindfucks go, the Spanish micro-budget indie Timecrimes is actually a pretty good lay – it’s not easy likely that you’d focus on its biggest problems while you’re watching. But the next morning, when you’ve got a little headache on, and you turn over to see this splotchy mess lying in bed next to you, […]
Twelve years after making her directorial debut, Kelly Reichardt exploded into the indie film consciousness in 2006 with the absurdly effective Old Joy, one of the least-seen, best-reviewed films of the last few years. With a virtually invisible but strong edge of political commentary and a story so delicate and whispy you might as well […]
Punisher: War Zone is, and I believe I am using this word correctly, gauche. It is a gauche movie. There are probably other adjectives that right-thinking people could all agree on to describe a film in which dozens and dozens of people are killed in methods that produce maximal amounts of flying blood and viscera, […]
Tonight’s lesson: the difference between a movie that is good, and a movie that is interesting.* After exploding into the mainstream in the mid-’90s following a smattering of remarkably avant-garde indies that won him a rabid but tiny fan base, Gus Van Sant lost his way. Remaking the iconic Psycho shot-for-shot might have possessed some […]
Frequently cited as the world’s first science-fiction film by people who apparently regard Georges Méliès as a documentarian (his seminal Voyage dans la lune wasn’t even his own first sci-fi picture), René Clair’s Paris qui dort nevertheless can lay claim to being the longest science-fiction film at the time of its 1924 creation. Unfortunately, I’m […]
The Luc Besson-produced The Transporter and its sequel Transporter 2 are by all means dumb action movies, according to any reasonable definition of “dumb” that I can imagine. But they are both a great deal of fun also, and I do not deny having a certain affection for dumb fun. Particularly in the case of […]
I am disappointed, but not particularly surprised, by the somewhat chilly reception that has greeted Australia. It is unmistakably a throwback: not just unashamedly old-fashioned, but altogether smug about it. And old-fashioned films aren’t really in style right now, especially from a director like Baz Luhrmann, whose career to this point has been exclusively concerned […]
Some movies could be very good, except for a single flaw that dooms the whole production to failure. Four Christmases isn’t one of them, but it’s a very close cousin: though it could never, in its current state, be a very good film, there’s an obviously good film lying just under the surface, always threatening […]
