So, anytime Brad Bird wants to make another live-action franchise picture, it’s all right with me. For Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Bird’s first foray outside of the world of animation, is pretty much great, certainly in the top tier of 2011’s ‘splodey action pictures. On the one hand, this is merely a relief – […]
In Albert Nobbs, Glenn Close plays a man (it is likely you know this if you’ve heard anything about the movie, because it is the only thing that the marketing really cares to mention). More precisely, she plays a woman posing as a man in 19th Century Ireland for economic purposes – she wants to […]
The party line on A Dangerous Method is that it is more of a period piece – and a sort of biopic to boot – than it is a David Cronenberg picture, and that whatever its relative success or failures, we’d all be better off with a little bit more heads exploding and nightmare gynecology, […]
In almost every way, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is functionally identical to the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes with which it shares almost all the important people on both sides of the camera, except for the writers (and the writers, I think we can most of us agree, are not actually very important people […]
The year of my birth, 1981, was among the worst in cinema history, something I’ve only become strongly aware of in the last few weeks; yet it’s also the year that produced my second-favorite movie of all time.* And while it is undeniably the case that the world does not need another review of Raiders […]
The creators: Writer/director Glen Morgan, who was in his day one-half of the writing team responsible for some of the finest episodes of the early seasons of The X-Files. 2006 was not his day. (His writing partner, James Wong, is on hand as producer). The plot: First, that viewer which looks for more of the […]
New Year’s Eve is a holiday-themed romantic comedy about a record company executive played by John Lithgow, totally absorbed with himself and so chiseling and greedy that he writes his secretary a check for her feeble holiday bonus right in front of her; so broken and devoid of empathy that he cannot comprehend why she […]
Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira is 103 years old – just turned 103 a few days before I write this, in fact. I lead with this because every review of a de Oliveira film is forced to reckon with this fact, on account of every single time he makes a movie, it sets a record […]
Honest to blog, homeskillet, Young Adult features people talking like actual human beings anywhere in the world really talk, using words that exist. In this respect, it represents a tremendous leap forward for Diablo Cody, who managed back in 2007 to ruin her smart, nervy script for Juno by forcing some of the most unattractive […]
In its earliest screen incarnations, The Interrupters is said to have run as long as 165 minutes, forty minutes longer than the version ultimately given wide release (or, you know, “wide release”), and while even the two-hour version of the story doesn’t really need that much running time to make its thematic points, I should […]
The best parts of I Melt with You are in the first 40 minutes, when it’s a story of four 44-year-old men indulging in a non-stop whirlwind of alcohol and recreational drugs just because they can, and also to stop feeling pain and any other human emotion. It is a celebration of absolutely everything that […]
Don’t have time to read my blathering about something I’m underqualified to discuss? That’s fine! But please skip to the end and watch one of the most awesome things you have ever seen. The problem with paying tribute to the films of my birth year is my birth year: 1981 was one of the low […]
