Typically, a movie gets just one opening gambit, and most are too scared to take the opportunity. Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation gets two, and it makes both of them count: first, we see passports being photocopied, from a perspective inside the copier, one after the other, a different one every time, without anyone ever coming […]
Firstly, The Iron Lady is historically illiterate to a degree that shouldn’t be allowed for a movie dramatising events that happened less than three decades ago, and I suspect that’s true regardless of whether you’re a fan of contentious and controversial Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, or if like me you regard her as one of […]
I’d heard several different people describe Weekend as “the gay Brief Encounter“, and every time it threw me: we already had gay Brief Encounter, didn’t we? It was called Brokeback Mountain, and it was kind of a big deal not that many years ago. Of course, gay movies don’t get a whole lot less gay […]
Writer-director Dee Rees’s semi-autobiographical Pariah is simultaneously the most exciting and most frustrating kind of first feature; frustrating precisely because it’s so exciting, in fact, and it makes one angry that it couldn’t have been even better. Particularly because the reason it isn’t even better is strictly a failure of nerve: an intuitive filmmaker with […]
Some directors, following a long break between films, come back refreshed, recharged, and ready to do bold new things – the Stanley Kubrick Effect, we can call it – and some seem to have forgotten how the hell to make a movie. It causes me nothing but pain to say this, but Steven Spielberg has, […]
Most of us would not, I suspect, look at the 17-year reign of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and then the branch of astronomy concerned with the study of stellar remnants and the origin of heavy elements, and say to ourselves, “You know, those two things seem to me like two sides of the same coin”. […]
In the wake of Star Wars in 1977, pretty much every movie studio in the world was trying to find a way to get something just like it, and this let to some very odd things getting produced on the grounds that they were family-friendly sci-fi or fantasy movies (or both, when possible). Of these, […]
To All a Goodnight (1980, USA) The creators: Writer Alex Rebar, who’s probably best known as the titular Incredible Melting Man, and director HOLY SHIT IT WAS DIRECTED BY DAVID HESS. It was, in fact, his very first directorial credit and for 30 years his only directorial credit, which is maybe evidence that starring in […]
Tom McCarthy, an actor of little particular note turned indie filmmaker of some considerable note indeed, has a weirdly precise shtick that has worked extremely well for him in the past: build a low-key, character-driven drama/comedy with quirky situations but not quirky humor around an immensely talented but traditionally underserved character actor, once every four […]
The easy part first: the David Fincher-directed and Steve Zaillian-scripted The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is better across the board than 2009’s Män som hatar kvinnor, the Swedish adaptation of the same source novel by the late Stieg Larsson. The sole exception is the key role of that very same tattooed girl, where it’s […]
Of all the filmmakers associated (usually against their choosing) with the Mumblecore branch of independent filmmaking, Aaron Katz always stuck me as having the most native talent; his debut, Dance Party, USA is among the best films of the generally indecent subgenre of inarticulate post-collegiates shuffling through life in the big city, unable to form […]
It’s not at all reasonable to say of something that’s as blissfully enjoyable for as much of its running time as The Adventures of Tintin is, “I was completely disappointed’; but that film’s director, Steven Spielberg, has set the bar about as high as anyone could for adventure films that marry the narrative innocence of […]
