Death Becomes Him: Robert Altman’s Prairie Home Companion
In which Altman doesn’t go gentle into that good night Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, based in part on Garrison Keillor’s long-running radio show, observes the last stand of[…]
Carpe Keillor: Nashville Director Finds Longtime Companion
“Singing is the only thing that puts me right.” Rush Limbaugh and his abusive ilk notwithstanding, radio as a medium is tolerant, forgiving and kind. To air on radio is[…]
The Don Goes Digital: Don Giovanni — Mozart’s Dramma Giocosa for the Ages
Jürgen Flimm and Brian Large supply a stage production that lives on DVD A stage production that doesn’t look stagy on home video? I said it couldn’t be done, more[…]
Finding the Funny, One Dick Joke at a Time: Comedy Central’s Pam Anderson Roast on DVD
Enough engorged vagina jokes to feed a family of four for an entire year! Some pleasures — a blow job from Angelina Jolie, for example1 — lie permanently out of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Forbidden Fruit? Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible III
Is it a sin to see this film? There is no doubt that Tom Cruise is guilty of acting like a movie star in public. He’s jumped on Oprah’s couch,[…]
Woody Allen, Misanthropy, and Match Point: Or How Death Got the Last Laugh
Welcome to the “nihilistic message movie” “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my works. I want to achieve it by not dying.” . . . “I don’t mind dying,[…]
School Daze: The Curious Young Girls of Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence
“Don’t resist, my dear.” Knowing that Lucile Hadzihalilovic is the partner of Gaspar Noé — he of the 10-minute one-take rape scene in the brutalist Irréversible (2002) — might make[…]
The Devil Wears Product: Anne Hathaway Almost Loses Her Cherry to the Big Apple in The Devil Wears Prada
“You’re making fashion history” — not! Is it possible to have a size 4 ass without a size 4 soul? Nuh-uh, says Hollywood, which knows a lot about both, in[…]
The Muscles from Bois de Bologne: David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli Kick Gallic Butt in Pierre Morel’s District B-13
Do not be alarmed, monsieur. We come from France. We are here to eat your sausages. Is France as fucked up as the U.S.? According to Pierre Morel, the answer[…]
Jesus, Mary, and Sophie! Tom Hanks Faces Torture by Elevator in Ron Howard’s Da Vinci Code
So middle of the road you can’t see the fucking curb Jazz for people who hate jazz? Who needs it? Chinese food for people who don’t eat Chinese? No way![…]
The Image-Makers, at Dusk: On the documentary Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography
“Glassman uncovers networks of influence and inference, whole microhistories around the camera . . . “ Interviewed by Peter Cowie for Cowie’s book Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Looking at Charlie — First National, Shoulder Arms, and The Kid: An Occasional Series on the Art and Life of Charlie Chaplin
“LOST CHILD WANTED — Last seen with a little man with large flat feet and a small moustache” In 1917, for the first time in his life, Charlie Chaplin took[…]
Eco-Apocalypse and the Powerpoint Film: Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth
“The film is a kind of subtle argumentation by analogy, whose success rests on the viewer’s desire to identify with Gore.” Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth may get the honor[…]
“We’re Not Happy and We Never Will Be”: On Cronaca di un amore
Antonioni’s early masterpiece looks better than ever More and more, DVD is in the position of resuscitating and saving a director’s reputation, or at the least reminding us and keeping[…]
Genet Meets Fassbinder: Sexual Disorientation(s) in Querelle
“Why is Fassbinder allowed this aesthetic duplicity in the melodramas but not in Querelle?” When the titular hero of Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest allows himself to be fucked for the[…]
Taking the Word of a Talking Alligator: The Garbage Pail Kids Movie Reconsidered
Deleuze, Marcuse, Bahktin, Dodger, Juice, Valerie Vomit . . . Only a few years ago, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain was accepted as the most influential work in 20th-century art, by a[…]
Taking a Break in Hollywood: The Dreamers of Holiday and The Razor’s Edge
“In films these days, people are hardly ever ‘taken’ by others — they don’t strike up sudden affinities, or become voluptuously intrigued by enemies.” In the 1940s, it was quite[…]
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows
“Whether alone or with others, you live with yourself.” Like Jean-Pierre Melville, Albert Camus was a young man active in the French Resistance, during which he wrote editorials for the[…]
Market Forces: Desperation in Caché, The Child, Paradise Now, and 13 Tzameti
Location, location, location First-world living promotes a comforting fairy-tale that if we all work hard, very hard, the rewards of the market can be ours. But even the most upbeat[…]
In Love with Liv Who Loves Life: Surviving Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf
“If the demons leave, maybe the angels will too” All happy artists — to subvert Tolstoy’s dictum about families — are different, each in their own way, but all unhappy[…]
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