I hate using the words “not for everyone” simply because there really isn’t anything that is for everyone (claims by Sara Lee to the contrary), but Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is probably a little more not for everyone than your average movie. With the exception (for very different reasons) of John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, The […]

The Hendersonville Film Society’s annual Thanksgiving turkey is Appointment With Death (1988) this year, a film that is less a seasonal fowl than a frustrating, interesting, wrongheaded film from a frequently frustrating, interesting, wrongheaded filmmaker, Michael Winner. Winner was one of the more interesting 1960s filmmakers to emerge from the British Invasion, making enjoyable films […]

I have a great fondness for the original Casino Royale (1967). It was the first movie I ever paid to see twice (I was 12 at the time). It was also the movie that put an end to seeing movies as a family outing with my parents — I loved it; they hated it. I […]

Musically, George Miller’s CGI extravaganza Happy Feet is the Moulin Rouge! (2001) of animated all-singing, all-talking, all-dancing penguin movies. Like Baz Luhrmann before him, Miller takes an array of pop/rock songs — a little Queen, a little Prince, a dash of Elvis, a dollop of Stevie Wonder — and uses them to create a musical […]

Catherine Deneuve is luminous as always in Indochine (1992), a film that picked up the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1993, and has the inherent sadness of all films set at the end of an era. (Regardless of how you feel about the era in question, there’s an inescapable melancholy that clings to […]

I have a tendency to like Stephen Frears’ work — not to mention unabashedly loving three of his films (anyone who can name the three has been reading this column too closely). Helen Mirren is like a small goddess to me. And I confess to being a staunch Anglophile as well — though this is […]

Well, the results are in on The Return, and it seems that the reviews are generally scathing and that it’s being written off as a disaster at the box office. I can’t say that I’m shocked by either announcement, and I can’t say that I think The Return is exactly a good film. Neither do […]

Despite the fact that Viva Zapata (1952) hardly represents the best work of either writer John Steinbeck, director Elia Kazan or actor Marlon Brando doesn’t mean that it’s not a worthy endeavor. If it isn’t quite an essential of 1950s American film, neither is it too far removed from it. As a biography of Emiliano […]

Just exactly why anyone anywhere at anytime thought it would be a good idea to have Ridley Scott make a romantic comedy starring Russell Crowe is one of the great riddles of the universe. Actually, since Scott produced the film, one can only presume that the idea of making A Good Year was his, but […]

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and his writing partner Guillermo Arriaga are certainly ambitious fellows. They demonstrated this with Amores Perros (2000) and again with 21 Grams (2003) — both films with multiple stories that ultimately connect to create a larger picture. With Babel they become more geographically ambitious with interconnected stories set in the U.S., Mexico, […]

Liev Schreiber’s directorial debut, Everything Is Iluminated (2005), makes a return visit thanks to the Hendersonville Film Society, and a welcome return it is. I often find it interesting to revisit a film I’ve already written about, if only to see how those original thoughts stack up against seeing the film again. (For a more […]

That I would end up loving a movie starring Will Ferrell rates pretty high on the scale of unlikely events. Yes, I knew that this was supposed to contain a Will Ferrell performance unlike any other, but I couldn’t help but remember how his “subdued” performance in Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda (2004) had marred […]

OK, let’s put this into perspective, shall we? Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (hereafter, only referred to as Borat, thank goodness) is not the funniest movie ever made. It is not an instant classic of the genre. It is not the most subversive film ever made. It is […]

An interesting screen translation of an Egyptian novel by Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz that transfers the action from Cairo to a single street — Midaq Alley — in Mexico City. El Callejon de los Milagros (1994) is a stylistic treat with a bit too little at its center. Despite the fact the film boasts […]

Warning: The motion picture under discussion here contains actual and unsimulated sexual activity of a type usually only found in outright pornographic movies. Nothing is left to the imagination. Everything is shown. (There’s even one shot that makes a rather pointed comment on the splatter form of art associated with Jackson Pollock’s paintings.) It’s all […]

Here we go again — another of these Tim Allen Santa Clause things. That means once more we’re treated to the unconvincing spectacle of 10-year-olds in elf drag, not very funny comedy on scrupulously antiseptic and unreal sets, and that faint wave of nausea that passes for a tug at the heartstrings in corporate filmmaking. […]

Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (1990) is an odd little movie — and a bit too leisurely paced — that was largely overlooked on its original release, but has come to be associated with a renaissance in black filmmaking of the era. Even at that, it’s a somewhat unusual work that deals — in […]

I liked The U.S. vs. John Lennon, but that was a foregone conclusion. I’m of the Beatles Generation pure and simple. I’m someone who skipped school the entire week that John and Yoko were the co-hosts on The Mike Douglas Show. (And, boy, did the clips used here show Mike Douglas to be a barely […]

To give it its full title — Who Is Bozo Texino? The Epic Account of the Improbable Discovery of the True Identity of the World’s Greatest Boxcar Artist — is to give something of the flavor of this eccentric-looking film from filmmaker Bill Daniel. Shot in black-and-white on 16mm, the film attempts to find Bozo […]