For the first beat of his first theatrical feature, Tony Scott made no little choices. When the little brother of Blade Runner and Alien mastermind Ridley Scott made the leap from television commercials to cinema with 1983’s The Hunger, he opened that film with one of the most in-your-face gestures of uncut style to be […]

The biggest question I had going into the long, long-awaited movie version of Jack Kerouac’s generation-defining 1957 novel (written in 1951) On the Road was whether it was going to have anything of value for someone who has not read the book, as I have not (like The Catcher in the Rye, it inspires the […]

You can’t always complain about how sex in movies comes in either the “prurient, puritanical, and embarrassed” flavor of the American cinema or the “explicit, specific, joyless, and punishing” flavor of the French (which I probably do more in real life than on the blog, but still…) and then not praise a movie that is […]

Of all the questions I hoped to have answered by a movie this summer, the one that’s been bothering me the most, for the longest time, is what on earth compelled Steven Soderbergh to direct Magic Mike. The parsimonious answer is that Channing Tatum told the director all about his life as a young stripper, […]

The controversy surrounding Basic Instinct when it was new was big enough that even I, as a ten-year-old, had some sense of it: gay activists protesting, Sharon Stone declaiming the film’s director as having photographed her genitalia without permission, Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter, receiving an unfathomable payday – and that last bit, I think, is […]

To a certain kind of film lover – the kind writing this film blog, for starters – the phrase “pre-Code” sparks a particular kind of joy. It refers to the thin window between the arrival of sound in 1929 and the time late in 1934 when the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, and the […]

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, […]

By this point, Michael Fassbender has become so entrenched as one of The Great Actors of His Generation that it’s kind of weird to think of how recently he wasn’t. Like, three years ago. Oh, there was 300, but nobody watching that really had much to say about the acting, and certainly nobody noticed the […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/16 & 10/17World premiere: 11 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival Fairy tales are of their nature an obvious place for revisionist feminist theory: the bulk of them, after all, are moral tales teaching proper behavior in pre-industrial societies where women, if they were phenomenally lucky, were permitted to speak to men other […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/9 & 10/14 & 10/15World premiere: 18 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival It’s certainly too early to confidently announce the death of the Romanian New Wave, especially with Corneliu Porumboiu and Christian Mungiu still alive and well, but it doesn’t take a doomsday prophet to find that the country’s national style has […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/13 & 10/15 & 10/16 World premiere: 12 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival If I were to lay out the plot of The Slut all nice and simple, it would sound like Israel is now in the business of exporting its pornography: there’s a small farming community out by nowhere, where 35-year-old […]

There are not very many horror writers whose work has managed to penetrate into the mainstream, and if you were to poll the first dozen people you ran into on the street to name the first one to jump to mind, you’d get eleven “Stephen Kings” and maybe one “Edgar Allan Poe” if you had […]