Every Sunday (or thereabouts) this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: there are few narrative tropes as well-worked as the one at the center The Dark Knight Rises, […]
There was every reason on earth to assume that J. Edgar was going to be bad or horrible: it is an Oscar season biopic, and that is absolutely never a good sign, directed by Clint Eastwood, a filmmaker with a one-size-fits-all aesthetic, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor who hasn’t done anything to seriously challenge […]
Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Final Destination 5 would appear to call for a violent horror movie, but thanks to the Summer of Blood, […]
Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: the prequel/remake/reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes once again asks the age-old question of what is the […]
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 […]
It would appear that the latest “masterpiece” phase of Clint Eastwood’s career has quieted down for the time being: after making a few knockouts in the middle of the decade, and in the process fully justifying those of us who’d been known to call him one of America’s great filmmakers since sometime in the ’90s […]
This is a very “based in 2008” review, especially in the opening grafs, but I’m sticking with it. Apologies. I’ve wanted to write this for a long time, but there was never a perfect excuse to do it before now. Clint Eastwood, regarded as something of a master of cinema by many (not all!) traditional […]
After directing three of the finest American films of the decade and one extraordinarily close near-miss, Clint Eastwood was probably due for a stumble. And that’s really all that I think Changeling is, a stumble, and not even a bad one: there’s quite a lot to love about Eastwood’s treatment of the grim true story […]
Letters from Iwo Jima, the companion film to Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, and the flip-side (I will not use the word “completion”) of the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima. It is unquestionably a more successful film than its sister, although I don’t want to get into a whole thing comparing them, not […]
I’m going to start off with the bold statement, and work my way back from there: Clint Eastwood is one of the greatest working American filmmakers. This is not, mind you, the petulance of a Mystic River/Million Dollar Baby fanboy. To some degree, I’ve thought something like that since long before either of those two […]
For my triumphant return to blogging, I am going to try to start a fight, and here is how I shall do it: by claiming that Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers is the greatest of all contemporary World War II films. By which I do not mean it is the best film set during […]
