The very best thing I can think to say about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is this: it has left me with absolutely no reason to assume that 2013’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is going to be half as much of a slog. If nothing else, that sequel’s title, in relation to the […]

My primary objection to the massively successful, award-winning, generation defining The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2003’s conclusion to the film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien’s multi-volume fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, is not an original one, nor a clever and insightful one, nor a […]

Okay, I admit: “missed” is a stretched. Yessir, I straight-up avoided The Perks of Being a Wallflower, whose trailer and general concept checked pretty much all of the boxes on my “must-avoid” list: artsy teens listening to hip music and being pained by how much more sensitive they were than everybody else, set in a […]

“Plague! We are in the middle of a fucking plague! And you behave like this! Plague! Forty million infected people is a fucking plague! We are in the worst shape we have ever, ever, ever been in. All those pills we’re shoveling down our throats, forget it! ACT UP has been taken over by a […]

The return to active filmmaking, after a 14-year drought, of writer-director Whit Stillman, was cause for celebration all by itself: we need more unrepentantly idiosyncratic voices. That the film which he he effects that return, Damsels in Distress, is such a frothy delight, too self-assured and solidly crafted, with too much subdued melancholy hiding underneath […]

Nobody can take away from the newest adaptation of the cinematically well-worn Wuthering Heights that it wants for a bold idea: Andrea Arnold, writer and director of the marvelous social-realist fables Red Road and Fish Tank, took her characteristic vérité style of hand-held camera and grotty sound and rugged, heavily naturalistic acting, and set it […]

There are some movies that beautiful and true chiefly in their purity: they are, and they pretend to be, one thing only. Such it is with The Raid: Redemption, an Indonesian action movie written and directed by a Welshman, Gareth Huw Evans. An action movie, and nothing at all but an action movie: insofar as […]

“But Jackson was just following Tolkien’s lead!” one might say. No. In fact, Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings as a six-part narrative, bound for convenience in three volumes, and it was partially Jackson & Company’s efforts to force it into a three-part structure that gave the films some of their narrative problems. But […]

The task of making a cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s gargantuan, six-part fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings that was, on the one hand, comprehensive enough that it didn’t feel like a rushed and perfunctory illustration of plot points masquerading as a dramatic narrative while also being, on the other hand, a manageable object […]

There is one way in which a person could seriously take issue with the documentary The Imposter: it skirts unnervingly close to exploiting its subject rather than presenting it, and with a subject this sensitive, exploitation is to be particularly avoided. For the movie is, at its heart, about a 13-year-old child who went missing […]

One of the agreed-upon narratives of the closing of the 2012 movie year is that, for once, the Oscarbait is really good: not that most people love everything, but damn near everybody loves something, whether it’s the old-fashioned political thrills of Argo, the new-fashioned iciness of Zero Dark Thirty, the austere lushness of Lincoln, the […]

This Is Not a Film. It is a legend passed around by cinephiles, of how Jafar Panahi, the director of several great, politically incendiary Iranian films (including The Circle and Offside), having been arrested by the government and forbidden from making any movies for 20 years, in addition to a six-year prison sentence, was able […]