What would you say is the “Greatest Good?” According to the official site of this Forest Service-produced centennial documentary on the history and mission of the Service, “Where conflicting interests must be reconciled, the question shall always be answered from the standpoint of the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run.” The […]
This is more than a mere documentary of the history of political activism at the University of California at Berkeley; it’s an oral history of a struggle (the good and the bad and the downright foolish) that has never gone away, but has merely metamorphosed over time into different forms. It’s as relevant today as […]
The First-Grader Vanishes … I mean Flightplan would like to be a Hitchcock movie when it grows up. Unfortunately, it never gets closer than swiping the premise of The Lady Vanishes, and instead ends up being perhaps the most absurd airborne melodrama since Doris Day landed an airliner in Andrew L. Stone’s Julie way back […]
Despite a few phrases and terms (“in the hood,” “that’s jacked,” “I was trippin’”) that I’m pretty sure were not common coin in 1978, Malcolm D. Lee’s Roll Bounce feels more like a movie from 1978 than one about 1978. It simply lets it be 1978 without bludgeoning the viewer over the head with quaint […]
“No Nudity, No Violence, Unspeakable Obscenity,” claims the tag line for this most unusual documentary, and they ain’t just playing “Annie Laurie” on kazoos when they say that. The movie is unrated — but would have gotten an NC-17 if it had been submitted to the MPAA — for a very good reason: It speaks […]
The Gold Rush marked Chaplin’s first Charlie Chaplin film to be released by his own company, United Artists, and was his most ambitious project to date (1925). And it remained one of his personal favorites. He went so far as to recut, score and narrate a reissue version in 1942. Today, it battles City Lights […]
Disabuse yourself of the notion that Tim Burton’s latest is going to be on as grand a scale as his earlier animated feature, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, and you’ll have a better time with this more intimate, sweetly macabre film. Burtonians will understand when I say Corpse Bride perhaps has more in common […]
Here’s a chance to get your feet wet in the realm of Ken Russell movies prior to the Asheville Film Festival, where he’ll be this year’s guest of honor and recipient of the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The Music Lovers — or to give the movie its full onscreen title,Ken Russell’s Film on Tchaikovsky and […]
I’m baffled by both the critics who’ve hated this movie and the few who’ve defended it. OK, perhaps not so much by the former, who, by and large, seem to feel that an overall distaste for horror pictures is a badge of cultural superiority. But the defenders of Venom are another matter. They seem to […]
Yes, An Unfinished Life is slow and predictable, and its symbolism is so heavy-handed that it may well give the unwary a concussion. And no, nobody actually talks like these characters do — but because everyone in this determinedly old-fashioned movie speaks in the same improbable manner, it never seems false. And there’s also a […]
I don’t care that Cry_Wolf expects me to buy 22-year-old Julian Morris (Whirlygirl) and 26-year-old Lindy Booth (Dawn of the Dead) as high school students. I don’t mind that it expects me to accept Jon Bon Jovi as a tweedy teacher (a concept giving new meaning to “Living on a Prayer”). I’m not even particularly […]
Local interest in Junebug is high, owing to its North Carolina setting and pedigree — and for the most part, that interest is justified. This modest little movie captures something of life in this state in ways that few previous films have. There’s not a lot of plot. Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz, The Emperor’s Club), who […]
Lord of War trades in irony. So it’s particularly apt that its greatest irony is that it starts out the work of a filmmaker well aware that he’s dealing with a visual medium and ends up as the work of a filmmaker who’s retreated into preachy speechifying. Writer-director Andrew Niccol opens Lord of War with […]
Even when it was new, All the President’s Men was something of an anomaly. It was a mystery where we already knew the solution: the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Today, we even know the identity of the mysterious informant, “Deep Throat” (played in the film by Hal Holbrook). So what — apart from historical […]
A good, almost great, movie, Broken Flowers suffers from two problems: Jim Jarmusch’s apparent need to be terminally hip and calculatedly quirky, and the belief that shots of Bill Murray staring blankly are endlessly profound. Problem is that Jarmusch probably is hip and quirky, and he would seem even more so if his films didn’t […]
More or less a straightforward A&E Biography on the legendary opera star, Enrico Caruso: Voice of the Century is mostly of interest for its archival footage and period recordings. Otherwise, this is typical of the Biography approach — fact-filled, sketchy on personality and careful not to do or say much of anything that might frighten […]
After fulfilling his contract at Universal with two time-marking projects (Outside the Law and The Iron Man) and one landmark film (Dracula), director Tod Browning returned to his home studio, MGM. There, he’d made his mark with a string of slightly macabre — often circus- or carnival-themed — movies that frequently starred Lon Chaney. Browning’s […]
This peculiar attempt to cross-breed the horror film with a courtroom drama — sort of Perry Mason and the Case of the Howling Teen or Inherit the Demon — has gotten high marks (for a horror picture) from some critics just for its trying to be different. But really, it isn’t even a case of […]
No, The Man is not the worst movie ever made — what an accomplishment that would be in 2005! But it ranks high on the list of most predictable and useless. If there’s any truth to the old saw that 100 monkeys left alone with typewriters would eventually write Hamlet, then this film feels like […]
Back in 1967 in his How I Won the War, Richard Lester included a fantasticated scene involving WW II-era British officers trading bubblegum cards of famous battles and war atrocities (“I’ve got ‘Alamein.’ I want ‘School Bombing’”). By the time of Desert Storm, the real world had caught up with Lester’s satirical notion — there […]
As I sat in the otherwise empty theater at the first showing of Underclassman, I found myself consumed with a series of nagging questions concerning the state of films, the mindset of the movie industry — and, the biggest question of all, why? Why was this movie made? Why does the movie industry continue to […]
