Thankfully, with the new year beginning on a Friday, there’s basically a one-week vacation from new releases, so over the next several days I’m going to take the opportunity to review some films from 2009 that I either didn’t have a chance to see during their release, or couldn’t find the time to review, in […]

I have a mental list of the professions that do and do not turn out good film directors. Screenwriters? Less often than you’d think. Music video directors? About half the time. Editors? Rarely happens, but they’re usually pretty good. Producers? Surprisingly, yes. Actors? Good directors of performance, yes; of the camera, almost never. Effects artists? […]

Remaking Federico Fellini’s epochal 1963 masterwork 8½ is not at all as heinous as it sounds: indeed, if we were to start listing films clearly influenced by Fellini’s massively self-reflective pseudo-autobiographical movie about an Italian film director who can’t come up with an idea for his next project, we’d even stumble across some near-masterpieces. Woody […]

The worst thing that ever happened to Peter Jackson was getting ahold of big budgets. When that happened, the gifted, snot-nosed indie director of the brilliant gore comedy Braindead (Dead Alive to us Yanks) and the unnerving psychological thriller Heavenly Creatures all but instantly forgot every damned thing that he ever knew about fleet storytelling. […]

At the very least, Crazy Heart, writer-director Scott Cooper’s debut feature in both of those positions, has a refreshing lack of pretension. No social commentary, no grand statements about the human condition, no wild aesthetic quirks that prove only that the director has more ambition than talent behind the camera. It is only a simple, […]

It is altogether possible that I might have almost liked Up in the Air if it had come as just a no-frills, “don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one” romantic comedy, and not an unstoppable awards season juggernaut. But it didn’t and I don’t. First point of clarification: I still don’t think I would […]

And y’all thought I had given up on the Pakulathon. To greet the 1990s, Alan J. Pakula directed and co-wrote (with Frank Pierson) an adaptation of Scott Turow’s legal thriller Presumed Innocent, a film that works not unlike a grab-bag of narrative tropes from earlier successes – and failures – in the director’s career. There’s […]

For a prestige season biopic about a member of the British royalty, The Young Victoria could certainly be a whole lot worse, and this is something I clung to as no uncertain comfort during the film’s 104 minute running time that feels a good deal longer. There might be no genre that I want to […]

It is largely a matter of chronology that my favorite of all adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – and maybe my favorite Christmas movie of all time – should end up as the very last entry in my impromptu retrospective of some of the variant forms of this most well-traveled narrative. But I […]

Once again, the grand master of Spanish cinema, Pedro Almodóvar, has done his same old thing: a crazed blend of melodrama and cinema history, spun into a twisty pile of psychosexual candy floss. One could be forgiven for wondering if and when he’s ever going to move into a new phase in his career, but […]

Dedicated to the memory of Roy Edward Disney, 1930-2009. Thank you for all that you did for your uncle’s company, and how grateful I am that you lived to see the rebirth of traditional Disney animation. That there are a great many feature-length cinematic versions of A Christmas Carol is entirely true (and who can […]

The thing about Avatar is that it’s not really a movie. It is, of course, but applying normal movie rules to it seems terribly inappropriate: yeah, the characters are thin stereotypes and the dialogue is wooden when it isn’t worse, and the plot is every “soldier learns to respect and love the people he was […]