Lonesome Road: Bruckheimer’s Folly
Glory Road? Make that Dead End. The first time I knew race was more of an influence than a seven-foot center was when I went to support the Villanova basketball team[…]
Category: Reviews
When Portentous Met Pretentious: Rian Johnson’s Brick
“I’ve got all five senses and eight hours’ sleep! Don’t fuck with me!” “The trouble with making movies is that by the time you’re old enough to make them, you[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
When Fred Met Red: Fred Astaire, Red Skelton, and Vera-Ellen Commingle in Three Little Words
It’s Bert and Harry, together again! Why are you not excited? Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby are not names to conjure with, unless you’re excessively fond of conjuring, but back[…]
Game On: The Gold Diggers of Heartbreakers
The screwball comedy’s back, and Weaver’s got it Sex is not a tap, we’re told. Real sensuality is something that flows, right? It’s effortless, and you exude it — you[…]
Aural Drag: This Is What It Sounds Like, When Men Cry
Bwaaaaah! There’s a whole new wave of sensitive guy films emerging in the last few years, a wave that finally begins to recede (hopefully) with the stunning failure of Cameron[…]
French & American Beauty: Mid-20th-Century Vistas from Tati to Scorsese
Par avion ad astra * * * If the 1940s was a golden age, most of us born then would probably admit to having blinked and missed it. On the[…]
Men in Love: On Brokeback Mountain
” … I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love,” he said. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s an obscenity, a theory, a perversity.” “Well[…]
Proust Regained: On Raul Ruiz’s Time Regained and Filming the Unfilmable
“In a single bold stroke, Ruiz films the novel according to the play of images, feelings, scents, and tastes that Marcel experiences.” 1. An attempt to film Proust’s Remembrance of[…]
A History of Violence: A Minimum of Thought
“A whole load of ‘Aw’ with not a lot of ‘shucks,’ updated only by a little cunnilingus.” If David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence were an actor, it would be[…]
Auteur in Distress: On Wallace Beery, von Sternberg, and Sergeant Madden
Cinema’s supreme pictorialist surrenders to “the cop on the beat” Wallace Beery was always a strange case. An outstanding character actor throughout the silent era and the early sound period,[…]
Everyone Has Something to Hide: On Cronenberg’s A History of Violence
Unmasking (the) America(n) Two of the largest influences on postwar American life were the virtual invention of the teenager and self-help. Something for nothing underlies the idea behind each development.[…]
Ann-Margret in Wonderland: But Bates and the Brits Are at Home in The Return of the Soldier
“Her English accent wanders around her mouth like a playful ice cube.” Have pity on The Return of the Soldier. Shot in England in 1982, the film did not get[…]
Austria Hungry: The Return of a Film Nation
Vienna’s Forgotten Influence and New Austrian Film Two unrelated events signaled a kind of poetic caesura in Austrian cinema at its second turn of the century: Austria’s first film star,[…]
Unadaptable: A Fatal Problem with The Human Stain
“Why not sock the audiences early with the ‘fuck her in the ass’ line?” I do not look forward to any book I am reading being turned into a novel.1[…]
Babies Bubbling Up: David O Russell’s Fertile Perversity Filigrees Flirting with Disaster
“There’s always been an acute mystery attached to the body . . .” Since Flirting with Disaster starts with Patricia Arquette lying in bed for two minutes, we think we[…]
Tentacles No Knives Can Cut: Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale
All in the family, unfortunately Home is the place where, when you have to go there They have to take you in.” “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,[…]
The Last Cockroach: The De- and Rehumanizing of Culture in Cinema
Reasons to be evil An eclectic taste in films can have odd results. Having seen, within days of each other, Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004), and The Wraith (Mike Marvin,[…]
On Manderlay: This time “liberal” is a dirty word
“The movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society . . . America must be born again!” — Martin Luther King Jr. 1967 “Dear[…]
We’re Just Taller Children: On the Dardennes’ L’Enfant
The Belgian humanists’ most Bressonian film to date With Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s latest film, L’Enfant (The Child, 2005), we are on familiar territory: the setting of the brother-directors’ hometown[…]
Wim, We Hardly Know Ye: On Wenders’ Don’t Come Knocking
The bad news is . . . there’s not much good news If you’ve despaired at the Wim Wenders of recent years — that long line, since 1987’s Wings of[…]
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