I like to imagine that Jacques Demy first thought up The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a direct response to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 A Woman Is a Woman. That film, a splashy Technicolor Cinemascope musical, was also every inch a Godard film: amiably cynical, eager to tear itself apart and reveal all of the ways that […]
Author’s note, 2023: What a weirdly uncharitable, withholding review for the film from 2010 that I have, beyond a shadow of a doubt, thought of more often than any other. I’d even at this point call it a bonafide masterpiece and the director’s best work. I leave this review in place as a testimony to […]
The man who gives Restrepo its title appears very early on: on a bus heading to the Korangal Valley in Afghanistan, PFC Juan “Doc” Restrepo grabs the camcorder that his platoon is sending around the bus, to joyfully holler right into the lens how damn excited he is to be going into combat with all […]
Deprived of context, the first scene of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, makes pretty much no damn sense and it is nevertheless somehow discomfiting and unnerving – and as matter of fact, context doesn’t end up mattering very much, for although we learn a […]
“Things aren’t nice anymore”, flatly declares Becca (Nicole Kidman) early in Rabbit Hole, and though she’s describing the waking hell her life has been since her 4-year-old son was hit by a car and killed, she manages in that one phrase to sum up the movie as a whole: there is nothing at all nice […]
Ordinarily, one does not use the phrases “pretty damn great” and “crushing disappointment” in close proximity in a film review – yet here comes True Grit, the fifteenth feature written and directed by everyone’s favorite Minnesotan brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen; their first honest-to-God Western in a career that has consisted of almost nothing but […]
Author’s note: when I first wrote this review, the film seemed so agreeably slight that it struck me as quite deranged that anybody had ever thought it could possibly win an Oscar for anything other than Colin Firth. Oops. Will revisit it one of these days, but for now, let’s enjoy the spectacle of a […]
There’s really no way around it: TRON: Legacy is almost certainly the shallowest film of 2010. It is huge and shiny; it sounds like God himself was tinkering in the editing booth; the female lead is about as hot as it gets, and she spends every minute in a form-fitting costume with brightly colored lines […]
When Disney elected to cease paying for Walden Media’s adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, following the stilted box-office performance of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian in 2008, it looked for a little while that everybody’s favorite watered-down Christian apologetic series would peter out barely a quarter of the way through. Then […]
In the mid-1950s, an unpublished short story by S.S. Field and much-heralded screenwriter Seton I. Miller was picked up as a possible episode of the Disneyland television series. It told of a young boy and his imaginary friend, a powerful dragon who could protect the boy from the joyless world all around him: a fairly […]
A microbudget indie written and directed by a recent college grad who doesn’t know what to do with herself, featuring a recent college grad who doesn’t know what to do with herself played by the writer-director, starring the writer-director’s mother and sister as the character’s mother and sister, and they all live together in a […]
There’s a something about boxing pictures; a certain movieish quality to them that’s not equaled by any of the more popular sports (has there ever been a truly great football film? or hockey story? Only baseball has come anywhere close to replicating the cinematic durability of boxing, and then typically as the background to a […]
