Watch It Again: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
The high-tech and the primitive coexist in The Life Aquatic, much as they do in Keaton’s The Navigator, and as in all of Anderson’s films they combine with the deeply[…]
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The high-tech and the primitive coexist in The Life Aquatic, much as they do in Keaton’s The Navigator, and as in all of Anderson’s films they combine with the deeply[…]
Comedy · Drama · Festivals & Awards
To Dust (dir. Shawn Snyder) “Isn’t that sweet,” I thought when I picked up my mother’s dropped pocket calendar. So many dates had names on them. Mom doesn’t want to[…]
Comedy · Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
The effect is intimate, but not particularly enlightening. Love, Gilda offers a lot of reminiscing, some sweet (and a few heavy) insights, but very little new information about Radner’s life.[…]
Unassimilated weirdness is typical of Popeye – even in its soundtrack, where goofy “boing” effects are used to accompany ordinary, unheroic movement. Sweethaven’s anthem, the Harry Nilsson song “Everything Is[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
The Brothers don’t enter into sanctimonious class systems, organizational institutions, or drawing rooms to assimilate and enjoy the fruits of its privileges either; they gain access, enact a savage modus[…]
Activist & Political · Comedy · Horror
Yes, Society supplies the body horror, well crafted in all its sticky glory by Japanese effects expert Screaming Mad George, but it fuses it with teen movie, conspiracy thriller, and[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
“The major point of convergence between Cassavetes and the Dogme movement is an oppositional realist form that blurs the boundaries between being and performing.”
Comedy · Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
The recent passing of Adam West – who made Batman his own despite the many higher-profile claimants to the cape – reminds us of the feature film based on the witty TV[…]
Almost as if stolen from the time of the usual commitments of any working person engaged with the world, these images breathe a second, more intimate, rhythm into Paterson and[…]
The gender of work in the work films is a spectrum that includes both the neutered worker of The Bellboy and The Errand Boy and the feminized worker of Cinderfella,[…]
The whole film can be viewed as a consciousness-raising of sorts. While even new-wave French auteurs fall into predictable madeleine-inspired memory spirals riffing on (not to put too fine a point[…]
The truth is that they tend toward philosophical absurdism, rather than nihilism, and this perspective is what either makes or breaks their film in terms of commercial appeal. The draw,[…]
His Girl Friday’s headlong pace feels like that of modern life, and its rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue calls to mind our modern media babble, with innumerable people around the globe and[…]
Comedy · Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
From his very beginnings as a filmmaker, Griffith understood the efficacy of location shooting. Putting actors into real landscapes and streets not only went to authenticating the narrative but had[…]
Art doesn’t have to be autobiographical, does it? Woody can write about the kid he wasn’t as well as the kid he was, can’t he? * * * I haven’t[…]
The new Ghostbusters seems quite pleased with itself, but it leaves the overwhelming impression that nobody involved really believed in it. Despite the original film’s numerous flaws and Bill Murray’s[…]
The happy ending that sees the clown coupled with the girl never satisfies precisely because we know the clown’s appropriate place is one of “in-between-ness,” a position that stands in[…]
Comedy · Directors · Historical & Epic · LGBT & Queer
Hail, Caesar! is not one of the Coens’ better films, but, because of its grab-bag of Hollywood silliness, it is perhaps the best at illuminating one of the main reasons[…]
Years from now, there will be little question as to his place in film history – a prominent seat at the grownups’ table, with a place card highlighting his run[…]
Sometimes, the personal angle offers the clearest view. Now and then, the authorial “we” must be abandoned in favour of a more open-handed, first-person approach. Therefore, I’ll begin by saying[…]