We’re all familiar with the break-out quote—you know those little bits of excerpted reviews that festoon trailers, posters, newspaper ads, DVD cases and nowadays the internet. They always assure the viewers—usually in fewer words than found in the average Twitter tweet—of the untold delights awaiting them if they’ll plop those spondulicks down at the box office. Problem is they aren’t always exactly honest.
There’s nothing as exciting to look forward to this week as there was last week with Inception, though the opening of the Tilda Swinton picture I Am Love at the Carolina on Friday is good news for the art-film crowd. Reviews for both Inception and I Am Love will appear in this week’s issue of the Xpress—and, in fact, the quality of both films caused me to make the unprecedented step of having two weekly picks rather than one.
The year is a little more than half over. The last of the really highly anticipated summer films, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, has arrived. (OK, there’s some interesting small scale stuff slated to filter in through the rest of the summer, but the theoretically exciting part is winding down to wait for award season.) So I guess it’s time to look at the year to date and see where I’d be if I had to come up with a Ten Best list right now—and if such a thing is even possible.
By popular demand (or at least because somebody suggested it), the Thursday Horror Picture Show brings you Peter Jackson’s first feature film, the aptly named Bad Taste (1987). As you might guess, this was made before Jackson became all respectable and worked his way toward make butt-numbing “thrillers” like The Lovely Bones (2009). If you’ve […]
Though largely denigrated at the time of its release in 1965 as inferior to A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Richard Lester’s second film built around the Beatles, Help!, has been pretty completely vindicated by time. It has also been championed by no less a figure on the film scene than Martin Scorsese, who has compared […]
Stanley Donen’s Charade (1963) is often thought of in terms of ersatz Hitchcock, and that’s understandable, but it really does Donen and the film a disservice, because there are many things about it that are purely Donen. I remember seeing it at the Ritz Theatre in Winter Haven, Fla., when it first came out. I […]
Even though it’s only been about a year since King of Hearts (1966) was run locally, it’s nice to see this early cult classic (maybe the first film deserving that accolade) being remembered. The film seems a little less of a groundbreaker today, and its soft tone has caused it to be severely downgraded in […]
It’s been said to dissect comedy is like trying to wrestle it to the floor and break its arm—the point being, of course, that explaining what makes a thing funny will almost certainly render it unfunny. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen with Jordan Brady’s documentary I Am Comic, a film that tries less to explain what […]
Last week gave us at least two winners: Micmacs and Winter’s Bone, both of which scored with Asheville audiences even more highly than the national average. This week we look toward The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Cyrus and one of the most highly anticipated films of the summer, Christopher Nolan’s Inception.
So here we are at the halfway mark in the second month of the existence of the Asheville Film Society. So far we’ve run Blood Simple, Rushmore, The Times of Harvey Milk, Manhattan, Twentieth Century, Tetro, Blue Velvet and The City of Lost Children. This week we’ve got Tarsem Singh’s The Fall. That’s a pretty solid list and the response has been generally gratifying.
