There are filmmakers with an innate control of the medium, an ability to tell stories visually so effortlessly and intuitively that you never notice the strain. Julian Schnabel is not one of those filmmakers. With Miral, he has now gone four-for-four on movies based on real-life stories, all of them projects that the director clearly […]
After White Zombie made a splash in 1932, introducing the very idea of “zombies” to American filmgoers, it would seem like the next logical step would be for a small explosion in zombie pictures. This was the ’30s, after all, when Hollywood was in arguably the most knock-off friendly period in its history. And yet, […]
Marc Lummis, one of the finest folks I’ve known for age, wanted to dedicate his Carry On Campaign review request to Caroline Rinaldy, one of the finest folks I’ve met in the last couple of years. It gives me great pleasure to so dedicate. For a quote-ready teen comedy driven by endless pop-culture references and […]
The newly-created American Film Company, in the end credits of its very first feature, The Conspirator, announces its intentions to oversee the creation of “entertaining, engaging, and historically accurate” movies about great events in U.S. history, and this first effort comes so damn close. It is, as far as my limited expertise suggests, more than […]
As I am an honest person, I should confess that I was never going to admire Atlas Shrugged – I’m sorry, Atlas Shrugged: Part I, to give it its proper, and stupendously overweening title. Fact is, I am one of those folks for whom the very name “Ayn Rand” triggers some deep revulsion, instinctive and […]
Hop is still a fresh enough memory that one is tempted to give Rio credit solely for not sucking. Lord knows there’s nothing else to give it credit for: it is nearly the platonic ideal of a children’s movie that is completely devoid of either merit or flaw, existing solely that it might exist. Some […]
The full disclosure part first: I am not a fan of Scream. I find it smug and appallingly cynical, how it attempts to paper over its failings as a slasher film and a horror movie with a hyper-awareness of generic tropes, serving up hackneyed clichés while it winks and snorts and chuckles, “boy oh boy, […]
Despite its gloriously fervid title, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (winner of the 2010 Palme d’Or, mainstay of last fall’s festival season, but some of us just didn’t get to be the cool kids last year) strikes me as being the most mainstream, I daresay normal, film yet made by Thailand’s reigning […]
It has for some time been my custom to celebrate Easter by diving into a zombie movie or four; the problem is that there are precious few important zombie franchises and I’ve already reviewed most of them; also that once you get past the tip-top of the A-list of the subgenre, a disquieting and dispiriting […]
Reader Tess LeBlanc deserves an apology: I managed to lose the e-mail in which she made her request for a review as part of the Carry On Campaign. At long last, I have made good on my promise to her. I owe Paul Thomas Anderson and his 1999 feature Magnolia an apology: my memory of […]
The ad campaign for Hanna does something new in my experience: it credits the composers of the score as prominently as the director and almost as prominently as the actors. This is not unjustified, for Hanna is almost exclusively a grand experiment in surface style, an attempt to distract the viewer for almost two solid […]
A few years ago, a friend and I got in a bit of an argument: was David Gordon Green’s third feature, Undertow, up to the standards set by his first two films? Neither of us being a moron, we both agreed that George Washington was a consummate achievement, the kind of once-in-a-generation first feature, but […]
