To judge from the advertisements – and even some of the reviews – you’d be forgiven for assuming that Adventureland sees director Greg Mottola returning to the goofy, dirty comedy blended with sweet nostalgia that made Superbad a big ol’ hit back in the summer of 2007. It is not. Oh my, no. No, no, […]
Revolutionary Road is a bit familiar: a married couple lives in suburban hellscape, and watches with detached horror as their hopes and ambitions are slowly butchered. And it’s not just that this is a played-out theme: it’s not even the first of director Sam Mendes’s films on the idea. It was just nine years ago […]
Most of the conversation surrounding the alleged controversy of Towelhead, suburban satirist Alan Ball’s feature directorial debut, has centered on the question of whether it is exploitative in its depiction of a young Arab-American girl’s sexual awakening, with the common sentiment that Ball didn’t realise how murky the waters that he was treading. Nonsense, I […]
The word “pretentious” gets batted around a lot by people who don’t use it correctly. It does not mean, “This work of art requires that you think a lot, and it probably isn’t much fun to watch it, so only arrogant people and posers will claim to like it.” It means, “This work of art […]
Smart People isn’t really a good movie, and nothing I can say can change that fact. This is particularly galling, because I actually liked Smart People, and liking movies that I can tell aren’t very good always leaves me feeling like I’m easy to manipulate. My lack of critical strength notwithstanding, it’s a film that […]
David Gordon Green’s incredibly gentle decline continues apace. Eight years ago, he made his feature debut (at a ripe old 25) with George Washington, one of the great American films of the decade; now more than a year after its Sundance debut, his fourth feature Snow Angels is making the rounds, and I must conclude […]
There are films that are great because they treat upon deep human truths with passion and sensitivity. There are films that a great because they engage with the language of filmmaking and broaden the vocabulary of the cinema. Then, there are films that are really rather good, solely because they have a luminescent performance anchoring […]
