As you may know, the Academy Awards nominees for Best Foreign Language film get chosen by two groups: the old conservative group that enjoys simple morality plays, crusty grandpas, and dew-eyed children, and the edgy, smart group that was introduced in the 2000s specifically to make sure that at least some of the nominees are […]
In Darkness, an excessively serious-minded Holocaust drama directed by the unimpeachably sober prestige film specialist Agnieszka Holland, is such a tailor-made winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar that even now that it’s all done, I still can’t believe that it lost. Especially since it actually turns out to be quite good, despite a […]
The first thing is, the accusations that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is exploitative 9/11 porn, while true, miss the point. That particular bed had already been shat in by the horrendous 2005 source novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, which leaves only the argument that, well then, maybe they shouldn’t have made the book into […]
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 […]
In The Descendants, Matt King (George Clooney) at one point has this to say (in voiceover, for about 3,000% of the dialogue in the first half of the movie is in voiceover): “Somehow it feels natural to find a daughter of mine on a different island. My family seems exactly like an archipelago – all […]
My gut tells me that a great pun would be to call Martha Marcy May Marlene by the alternate name Martha Marcy Meh Marlene, but there are a number of objections to that, among them being that it’s not quite as bad as being “meh”, another that your eye tends to glide over the words […]
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 […]
Mike Gibson, in contributing to the Carry On Campaign, gave me one of the richest challenges I’ve ever been privileged to receive as a writer: to explain my dislike for a generally well-regarded movie in clear, thoughtful terms, engaging with it on an honest level, finding refuge in smart argument rather than dismissive snark. Oh, […]
Justin Wiemer’s contribution to the Carry On Campaign included the desire that I should review a movie that, to put it gently, hasn’t ever been terribly much in my favor. I will honestly admit that in rewatching it for the first time in a decade, I was forced to upgrade it from “no damn good” […]
There’s a notion that every one of us has fallen into at one point or another: great art is depressing. It’s what drives the Oscars, film festival praise, top 10 lists (if you can think of any critics who explicitly or implicitly declared insightful relationship tragedy Blue Valentine to be superior to insightful relationship action […]
Chris Walters included a list of possible reviews along with his Carry On Campaign donation, and I used the excuse to fill one of the more embarrassing holes in my film viewing history. My thanks to him for letting me cover my ass. Remember after Out of Africa came out, how there was that huge […]
I maintain that it is tremendously gratifying to have a filmmaker like Clint Eastwood, who at the tottering old age of 80, when most directors have long since called it a career, is still pushing himself to do new things, even when those things work intermittently, if at all. In the last five years, the […]
