Conventional wisdom tells us that this has been a fairly weak year for American cinema; and I’m not about to tell conventional wisdom that it’s wrong. Following a summer of rare ineptitude – I hope it’s not just my increasing age that leads me to call it the worst summer movie season in my memory – we received a fall and winter of many perfectly good movies and almost none […]

The Social Network rides into town on the back of the biggest buzz of any film of 2010. The only film greeted with more anticipation by more people this year has been Toy Story 3, and even that was less about the movie itself than about its predecessors. So it’s a bit of a nice coincidence that The Social Network should end up being the best film released in America […]

The big news ’round these parts is, of course, the Chicago International Film Festival; which I, frustratingly, will not be able to do up as vigorously as has been my wont. Though as of this writing, I’m guaranteed to hit at least three films, so it won’t be a total wipeout. Anyway, with Oscar Season starting up in earnest, there are at least some other likely looking films in *shudder* […]

Frank Capra is a hard director for me to get a bead on. Once upon a time, he was one of the most successful working filmmakers in Hollywood, only to have his reputation start to tarnish in later years as he was increasingly regarded as an auteur of banal, feel-good corniness. Then, sometime around 15 or 20 years ago, somebody watched It’s a Wonderful Life, realised that it’s incredibly depressing […]

In retrospect it seems obvious that a film about one of the greatest tragedies of the 1960s youth movement should be explosively inventive and innovative, but years of blandly pandering films aimed squarely at sentimental Boomers have blunted a basic truth: art about radicals needs to be radical itself. While it would be arguing too much to say that Chicago 10 pushes the limits of its form as much as […]

The Oscars! I don’t know what to say, really: I’m still, two years later, grousing that Crash beat Brokeback Mountain, and yet I’m here anyway, part of that whole scene. The best I could do was wait until just a couple days before the announcements are made. Because you know what? Just because they reward the easy and mediocre over the daring and wonderful doesn’t mean I don’t love them […]

Here’s the crazy thing about Charlie Wilson’s War: I liked it, in fact I liked it quite a lot, and all I can think to talk about is its flaws. The chief among those flaws is probably that it’s a film about the history of the United States’ intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s and how badly we mangled the post-war maintenance of that country that is a) defanged of […]