I’ve been as loud as anyone in my distaste for the recent subgenre, “hideous African tragedies viewed primarily in terms of how they affect white people,” and yet here we have Shooting Dogs (bizarrely renamed Beyond the Gates for the US, a worse title by every measure that isn’t marketing), a story about two white […]
Primeval is a failure in virtually every way that a film can fail: it is not smart, it is not scary, and it is not funny, and a film about a 25-foot maneating crocodile named “Gustave” needs to be at least one of those things. Instead, it hits a near-perfect triple play of being precisely […]
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 […]
(Yeah, I promised this would be up yesterday. Anyone willing to come to Evanston and help me bake 10 batches of cookies before Friday has freedom to complain). Previously: Mel Gibson disappointed me with the degree to which Apocalypto wasn’t batshit insane. It takes approximately no searching whatsoever to find the conventional wisdom that Blood […]
The short version: Babel is a punishingly long movie. This is not an easy thing for me to say. I adored Amores perros, director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first collaboration with writer Guillermo Arriaga, and while I had problems with their second film, 21 Grams, I still enjoyed it and recognised it as the product of […]
Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland is not precisely a biopic, insofar as its main character is a fictional composite. It’s not really a psychodrama, given that the brutal dictator that it takes as subject is never viewed from the “inside.” It is a study instead of the seductive appeal of pure evil – […]
The Constant Gardener is the kind of brainy thriller that one expects from an adaption of John Le Carré, noted British spy novelist and ennui expert. This might just be the best of all the Le Carré films I’ve seen: like all of them it evinces a frustration at the Proper British Way, but here […]
