Perhaps you would think, from the advertisements (which play up its ties to Little Miss Sunshine), from the presence of Alan Arkin (playing almost exactly the same character he played in Little Miss Sunshine), from the subject matter (the ways that family members both love and hate each other, and the crazy ways they prove […]
The first image we see of John Wayne, né Marion Morrison, in Stagecoach is inarguably one of the most iconic character introductions in all of cinema. You’ve probably seen it, even you haven’t seen the movie itself (and shame on you, if that’s so): some time after the titular vehicle rattles out of an unnamed […]
Here’s a hypothetical for you: suppose that there is a director who is – fully justifying a much-abused noun – a “visionary”. Does that director have the ability to save a film from itself? Not, unfortunately, in the case of Alex Proyas’s Knowing, although in this particular case, there are some caveats. This isn’t simply […]
The tidal wave of ’70s and ’80s genre film remakes that started up in the early years of this decade has produced works of wildly varying quality, from indefensibly wretched (The Hitcher) to no better than absolutely necessary (The Hills Have Eyes) to unexpectedly good (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). The only watermark yet to hit […]
That Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s epochal 1986 comic book miniseries Watchmen would not survive a translation to cinema intact was an inevitability: it is far too long for even the most indulgent running time, and too much of its impact come from formal elements unique to the comic medium. Taking that as read, the […]
The question, “Does the world need another satire of the L.A. entertainment industry?” has a swift, unambiguous answer: no. But that’s clearly not stopping anyone from making them, so the best we can hope for is that more of the things should be as genuinely funny as Punching the Clown, an absurd look at how […]
Agile, Mobile, Hostile: A Year with Andre Williams is one of those documentaries where it seems that the filmmakers approached their subject and started filming with one idea in mind, until real life intervened, and forced them into something much stranger and more uncomfortable and better than they’d originally planned. This is a double good […]
You’d expect one thing out of a movie with the words “street” and “fighter” in the title, and one of the greatest failures of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is how very little fighting actually goes on in its modestly convoluted plot about a young woman getting her revenge on a murderous Irish real-estate […]
When Joaquin Phoenix announced his present “retirement” – not that I doubt his sincerity, but I’ll believe it when he’s dead and not a moment sooner – the general response was that we lost one of the great actors of his generation, and the loss to cinema would be great and long-felt. A generous reaction, […]
The first thing to know is that Steve McQueen, noted cinematic cool guy, loved cars. Loved ’em to pieces. One of the jewels of his collection was a Porsche 908 race car, which the actor drove to a second-place finish on one of the world’s great endurance courses, the 12 Hours of Sebring race in […]
