“So there’s this this French defense attorney, played by Fabrice Luchini, who goes to Monaco to argue on behalf of a woman who killed her lover, a man with connections to the Russian mafia. He’s assigned a bodyguard by the woman’s family – the bodyguard is played by Roschdy Zem – and the lawyer is […]
The good folks at Blue Sky Studios have done it again: yet another brilliant short film starring the bedraggled, hungry Scrat, a sabre-toothed squirrel living in the Pleistocene Ice Age some ten or twenty millennia ago, an unspeaking slapstick comedian whose single skill is hunting for acorns, something he does with great enthusiasm and virtually […]
“I want you DEAD!” This arresting tagline appeared underneath the image of a zombie bedecked as Uncle Sam, pointing his decaying finger at the viewer in the manner of those classic armed forces recruitment posters. Additionally, the original run of VHS tapes had a lenticular cover, so that the zombie Uncle Sam morphed into a […]
Advocacy documentaries come in all colors and flavors, but only rarely are they as staggering as Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. which like most examples of the form commits the sin of assuming that you agree with it beforehand, but unlike most gets away with it, given that the statement “it is a bad thing to […]
The first thing I must get off my chest: if Public Enemies demonstrates anything, it’s that Michael Mann’s infatuation with high-definition video is becoming quite diabolical. When he used digital cameras to shoot Collateral, it made sense and it worked tremendously well; when he did the same for Miami Vice, it at the very least […]
Now for a very special moment in my Michael Mann retrospective: the first (and only) film that I’ve discussed on this blog before. Back in 2006, I was quite befuddled by Miami Vice, finding the narrative to be so messy that it almost had to be on purpose. Now, having tunneled through so much of […]
I think I say this every time a new film from director Stephen Frears comes out, but I really like Stephen Frears a whole lot, even though he’s not any kind of a “fashionable” director. The man has a quiet genius for making movies that are altogether right in every wee little detail, and while […]
