And then the wave rolled back: after The Insider, in all its outsized magnificence, Michael Mann has never again made a film of such caliber. An indication of the state where he career landed itself in the ’00s can perhaps be squirreled out of the fact that for his 2001 follow-up (the two-year gap between […]
In the spring of 1979, a 36-year-old nobody got a chance to make a TV movie. I take that back, not a nobody: he’d written a few episodes of some different cop shows, and directed an episode of the Angie Dickinson series Police Woman, and lest we forget, back in the ’70s there was no […]
The Coens, the Dardennes, the Quays. Filmmaker brothers tend to come in matched sets, working together at all times. Yet it is eminently clear in Carlos Cuarón’s debut feature as a director that he is not receiving any tips or aid from his famous sibling Alfonso, although that man did serve as his producer; and […]
When people like me are pressed to justify our love of those nasty, horrid exploitation movies of the 1970s – and I should mention that people like me are never actually pressed to make this justification, for the other people, not like me, are usually content simply to ignore people like me and dispose of […]
The first thing to know is that Steve McQueen, noted cinematic cool guy, loved cars. Loved ’em to pieces. One of the jewels of his collection was a Porsche 908 race car, which the actor drove to a second-place finish on one of the world’s great endurance courses, the 12 Hours of Sebring race in […]
Sometimes, you just have to admit that patterns crop up: this is turning into a winter of perfectly good movies that keep trying to suffocate the absolutely great movie hiding inside. Exactly three weeks ago, we were presented with the sight of Gus Van Sant playing nice for the Academy with the slightly-better-than-routine biopic Milk; […]
I was very excited to see what writer-director David Mamet had in store for us in Redbelt, his first film to be released after he stopped being a brain-dead liberal. Would it be an impassioned defense of privatized health care? A serious look at the need to bomb all Arabs into the Stone Age to […]
Run Fatboy Run is a paradox: it is a pretty good movie that is not good at all. Basically, the situation is that a team of really fine actors, led by the entirely reliable Simon Pegg and the desperately under-appreciated Thandie Newton are out there giving really solid performances in a script by Pegg and […]
For an actor famous for making essentially the same movie over and over again, the career of Will Ferrell has been marked by a rather violent fluctuation in the relative quality of his projects. None of them are original; some are still very good, and some kind of suck. I bring this up because somehow […]
It’s not at all a great film, but in one respect at least I feel the need to salute the makers of The Flying Scotsman for doing something that I’ve never seen a movie do before: combine the inspirational underdog sports movie with a fairly honest (for the movies) and kind of unpleasant exploration of […]
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 […]
