Three years ago, Jerry Bruckheimer, with his unfailing ability to produce movies that make endless amounts of money without filling any previously unfulfilled need, oversaw National Treasure, a moderately silly, moderately stupid and shockingly enjoyable matinee-style adventure yarn best described as “The Da Vinci Code but with American history.” Bruckheimer being Bruckheimer, it is deeply […]
Author’s note, July 2016: The tone is all wrong and I regret the limited chronological focus, but as I prepared to write a new version of this review, I found that I really had nothing to change besides the mode of expression. While it represents the style and thought process of a much younger, and […]
Perhaps you, like myself, made the assumption that a 12-years-later sequel to an action series noted for its significant fluctuations in quality and the PG-13 sequel to an action series noted for its violence and rough language, would be a feeble excuse for anything other than assuaging its over-the-hill star’s ego, and ultimately a fair […]
Ocean’s Thirteen is absolutely not a masterpiece. It’s something far more useful: the first major summer film of 2007 that isn’t a waste of time. Which is ironic, given that it’s essentially just a genial time-waster. As I’ve mentioned several dozen times here and elsewhere, I fully liked 2004’s Ocean’s Twelve. I would come much […]
My hopes were much higher than my expectations concerning 28 Weeks Later, which I figured would be somewhere between “tepid cash-in” and “almost as good as the first one.” On balance, I think it’s not entirely fair to compare this film with 28 Days Later, for they seek to do different things, but if I […]
It is nigh unto objectively true that Spider-Man 3 is not nearly as good as Spider-Man or Spider-Man 2, but that is not quite mean that it is in fact bad. It’s a good comic book movie that suffers only because everyone expected (reasonably) that it was going to be a masterpiece. There are, I […]
When we think of great writer/director/actors, most of us, I hope, will come up with names like Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Charles Chaplin, Jacques Tati. I think most of us will not think of Sylvester Stallone. And while Rocky Balboa won’t convince anybody to add his name to the extremely short list of supremely talented […]
It’s a wonderful thing to have ludicrously heightened expectations, and then to see them surpassed. I give you Casino Royale, the best James Bond film since the ’60s, starring Daniel Craig as the best James Bond since Sean Connery. British spy thrillers aren’t for everyone, and if the notion of a really top-drawer Bond film […]
The last credit at the start of Manoel de Oliveira’s Belle toujours dedicatesthe film in honor of Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, thereby suggesting that this is not to be a sequel to the 1967 Belle de jour so much as a celebration of that film. Which, more or less, turns out to be the […]
