Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Che

Steven Soderbergh’s 4.5-hour cinematic study of two years in the life of Che Guevara is absolutely confounding – not least because it’s hard even to figure out how to classify it. An eight-years-in-the-making dream project (financed in no small part by the director’s populist Ocean’s trilogy), the film premiered at the 2008 Cannes festival as […]

One of my favorite lines from the ever-quotable Casablanca goes like this: the sniveling Ugarte, played by Peter Lorre, is trying to wheedle a favor from Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, and he opens by counter-intuitively asking, “You despise me, don’t you?” To which Rick replies, without looking up, “If I gave you any thought, I probably […]

It is trite by now to observe the dual facts that Happy-Go-Lucky is one of the brightest and loveliest movies of the year, and that this is a surprise; but I can’t help myself. It was after all directed by noted British misery-monger Mike Leigh, a man given to dark irony and emotional sucker-punches, and […]

On paper, Of Time and the City looks to be a bad way to begin one’s exploration of the films of Terence Davies, a notoriously anti-prolific Brit who has now directed a grand total of five feature films and a trilogy of shorts in a career which began in 1976. But I didn’t know anything […]

I’d dearly love to spring out with the ol’ contrarianism and declare Burn After Reading to be a better film than No Country for Old Men, but I really don’t believe I can defend that argument. So instead, let me just stick to the easy praise: Burn After Reading is easily the funniest film by […]

In the current comic-book movie flood that began in 2000, it’s always seemed to me that 2005 ought to be regarded as the highest water-mark, producing three of the smartest, most stylistically compelling and absolutely the darkest films of the genre: in April of that year, we were treated to Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s […]

The work of Candian filmmaker Guy Maddin falls squarely into love-it or hate-it territory, although “hate-it” might be too strong; “find it humourlessly indulgent” is probably better. Anyway, I love it, and I’m not going to try to mount a defense of the director, because I think so much of what makes his films work […]

I have seen the future of cinema, and it is a bug-eyed, box-shaped robot. That’s not meant to be a pun about how Pixar’s miraculous ninth feature, WALL·E, is set in the year 2800. Though I’ve certainly made worse puns. No, what I mean is that WALL·E the movie and WALL·E, the obscenely cute star […]

We’re accustomed to saying that a “contrived” story is necessarily unsatisfying, but Fatih Akin’s fascinating and brilliant The Edge of Heaven puts that notion to the test: the movie presents a tangled network connecting six people that could hardly be more contrived, and to add insult to injury, most of those contrivances don’t end up […]

Once upon a time in Los Angeles, a little girl recuperating in a hospital with a broken arm befriended a crippled silent film stuntman who was trying to kill himself after his girlfriend left him for a dashing movie star. In an attempt to hide from his broken heart, he began to tell her a […]

Looking back at what I’ve written in this series over the past few weeks, I noticed that for a month now, I’ve only reviewed black-and-white movies: happy ones, sad ones, violent ones, funny ones, American ones, foreign ones: all very good and all monochromatic. It was time for what we sober types in the business […]

I don’t want to use P.T. Anderson’s newest film to beat up on his old films, but I did want to mention a striking pattern of diminishing returns that I’ve experienced with the director: I very much like all of Hard Eight and I love some of it, I really like the first half of […]