If Michael Shannon gives his best onscreen performance ever in Take Shelter, and creates what might well be the finest male character of 2011, it’s not exactly a shocking achievement: the role could just as well have been created for him by Jeff Nichols (and very possibly was), whose only prior work as writer and […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/13 & 10/15 World premiere: 14 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival There have been many films about the confounded lot of women in contemporary Iran (and given how incredibly shitty that lot seems to be, it’s not the sort of thing I feel compelled to complain about), and on that […]
For a film that treats on the themes of free will and the identity of God, The Adjustment Bureau is an awfully light-headed popcorn movie. Upon reflection, I think this is all for the good: better for these concept-heavy sci-fi thrillers with pot-addled-freshmen-late-night-bull-session philosophies to dismiss themselves & save the rest of us the work: […]
If Roman Polanski never makes another film after The Ghost Writer, the very least we’ll be able to say about the man is this: he managed to end his career with a pretty crackerjack thriller, no masterpiece on the scale of Chinatown or Knife in the Water (and really, how could it be?), but a […]
(After experimenting this way and that, I’ve realised that I can’t really write any kind of analysis of Shutter Island that addresses exactly what makes it such an irritating, dispiriting and above all unsatisfying experience, without making pretty damn free with the spoilers for the film’s massive, easily-guessed third act twist. So easily-guessed, in fact, […]
I think that it is possible that no film in history before The Passion of the Christ could have been as theoretically unsuspenseful as All the President’s Men. President Richard M. Nixon was tied to the conspiracy to cover-up the White House connections to the attempted bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, and resigned […]
With his fourth feature, Alan J. Pakula made a fairly decisive break with what had been his most easily definable thematic concerns up to that point, and thereby created one of the two films that have since absolutely secured his position as one of the great American directors of the 1970s. Prior to 1974, we […]
When I included Alan J. Pakula on my poll for who most deserved a full-on retrospective (mostly at the urging of a friend, who wanted to see Pakula get his proper consideration as one of the great directors of the 1970s), it was with no small trepidation; though I didn’t think he’d come anywhere close […]
Aspiring filmmakers looking to see how to make the most from a limited budget would do well to take a good long look at Duncan Jones’s Moon, a $5 million indie that’s the next thing to a one-man show, shot in a handful of sparsely decorated interiors. From these paltry ingredients, Jones (the son of […]
God only knows why Steven Spielberg is so hellbent on making an action hero out of Shia LaBeouf, but with Transformers, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and now Eagle Eye, every single film that he’s produced or directed in the last two years has featured LaBeouf running from or through massive […]
88 Minutes is Al Pacino’s worst film ever. I’ve given that sentence its own paragraph, to make sure it sinks in all the way. In fact, I’ll do so again: 88 Minutes is Al Pacino’s worst film. Ever. In this particular film, Pacino plays Dr. Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist whose testimony was instrumental in […]
There is a certain kind of writer-director that emphasises the first half of that equation: write a great script and then just slap it up on the screen. Woody Allen is the godfather of this mentality (though he is not always beholden to it); men like Barry Levinson is its elder statesman; M. Night Shyamalan […]
