The hype was right. No Country for Old Men is basically flawless. Scrupulously adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, frequently called “minor” on the apparent grounds that it is one of the author’s easiest books to read, the film represents a roaring return for filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen to the mode of their heyday, […]
There are some words that I try never to use when describing any movie – try, I say, and often I do not succeed – “poetic,” “mystic,” “hazy,” “dreamy,” words like that. I want to use every single one of them in discussing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. For you […]
“If we dare to tell the truth about the past, perhaps we shall dare tell the truth about the present.” -Ken Loach, 2006 Cannes Film Festival “A bullet pierced my true love’s side in life’s young spring so early And on my breast in blood she died while soft winds shook the barley.” -Robert Dwyer […]
As everybody knows, America is obsessed with killers. I shall prove this with the following two lists: -John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy -William B. Saxbe, Ramsey Clark, Richard Thornburgh, Edward Levi What do the four names in each set have in common? If you said “the first four are serial killers, […]
William H. Macy is in INLAND EMPIRE for one shot lasting less than twenty seconds, and his single line ends with this phrase: “Hollywood, where stars make dreams and dreams make stars.” That’s probably not true, and it ignores a question near and dear to David Lynch’s heart: what about nightmares? Certainly, the film seems […]
The funniest movie I’ve seen all year is a satire on the state of public discourse in Romania. No wait, come back! Please? A fost sau n-a fost?, or 12:08 East of Bucharest to us Yanks (the original title translates, I believe, as Was It or Wasn’t It?, making this one of the exceedingly rare […]
There will be those who deride Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century as pretentious and overly-artsy. Luckily, I am also pretentious and overly-artsy, and therefore I adored it. Apichatpong’s parents were both doctors, and this film is his tribute to them. It is accordingly divided into a feminine and a masculine half: the first part, […]
It’s very tempting to over-praise The Descent, a horror film by Neil “Dog Soldiers” Marshall released last year in Britain and most places that aren’t the United States. There is no genre of film so regularly ruined by inane scripts and boilerplate technical proficiency as horror, and so to stumble across a scary movie that’s […]
I have never before felt so thankless in writing a review – I come to praise the merits of one of the greatest films of this decade, in the full knowledge that most of my readers will never have the chance to see it, let alone the inclination. I refer to Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s […]
Wasn’t it just last week that I found myself hating on a neo-western? Left unsaid in that review was my suspicion that the death of the genre is less because it’s uninteresting and only attracts weak directors, and more because in the Postmodern Age, there’s no way to tell a western story without tarting it […]
For all that I bitch about the tedious movies that I see these days, I do live just one short el ride from the second-best art movie market in North America. Sure, a lot of what gets into art theatres is crap nowadays, but lo and behold I actually saw something like a masterpiece on […]
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada does many things very well, to the degree that I feel bad I have some complaints. It stars Tommy Lee Jones in his directorial debut, as a ranch hand who fulfills a promise he made to his now-dead friend (Julio Cesar Cedillo) by taking his body back to Mexico […]
