Apart from Sam Taylor’s The Taming of the Shrew (1929) (with its legendary title card reading, “by William Shakespeare, additional dialogue by Sam Taylor”), John Barrymore being let loose on a soliloquy from Richard II in Warner Bros.’ Show of Shows (1929), the “radicalized” Max Reinhardt version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), the teaming […]
Douglas McGrath’s infamously ill-timed Infamous is at least a minor tragedy of cinema. Not only is the film better than the overpraised (including by me) Capote (2005), it’s about a hundred times better than its famous predecessor — and Toby Jones’ doesn’t so much portray Truman Capote as he inhabits him in a way that […]
Straddling the line between Fellini’s realistic early period and the full-grown fantastication that began with 8 1/2 (1963) is La Dolce Vita (1960). It shares elements of both eras of Fellini — being at once realistic and yet edging toward the fantastic, and even incorporating elements of the fantastic into its reality. The film begins […]
The majority of critics have trashed Ryan Murphy’s (TV’s Nip/Tuck) debut feature Running with Scissors. Words like “smug,” “unpleasant” and “loathsome” (this last one crops up several times) pepper these reviews. There are a few notable exceptions — the reviews of Andrew Sarris, Jack Mathews and David Edelstein being among them — but the film […]
I am giving Saw III a two-star rating solely on the grounds of a certain technical proficiency. I was amused to hear two of my friends vocally freak out (there was some mention of the deity I believe) at the implied grotesqueness of shots that actually consisted of nothing more than someone turning a foot […]
A classic case of the importance of the subject matter being mistaken for the importance of the film about it, Clint Eastwood’s latest Oscar-bait, Flags of Our Fathers, is an uneven collection of mixed messages and the kind of sledgehammer simplifications that are part and parcel of any movie where Paul Haggis (Crash) has touched […]
Half Nelson is very likely going to become the overlooked film of the year. With precious few exceptions — Spellbound (2002), The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002), Being Julia (2004) — its distributor, ThinkFilm, has had very little luck promoting their releases. Moreover, the subject matter — a cocaine/crack-addict teacher befriended by a 12-year-old […]
Robert Greenwald doesn’t make films with an eye toward being fair and balanced, but then again, unlike the news organization he tackled in his Outfoxed documentary, he doesn’t make any such claims. He’s a fire-breathing liberal and proud of it — and he makes his films without pulling punches. Charges that Greenwald has an agenda […]
Far more baffling than any amount of legerdemain on display in one of this week’s other offerings, The Prestige, is just how Sofia Coppola could have Svengali’d the world into believing that her Marie Antoinette biopic is actually daring. When I first saw the trailer months ago, I thought it looked interesting, and I was […]
Hirokazu Koreeda’s Nobody Knows (2004) is one of those highly regarded recent films that just somehow never made it to Asheville during its original release, so it’s nice to see it finally show up. The film is based on an actual occurrence in Tokyo in 1988 when four children were abandoned by their mother to […]
Spider-Man is one of those slightly unfortunate films that was all the rage when it came out, garnered a lot of critical praise, and then was subsumed by a more elaborate and even more highly regarded sequel. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of Spider-Man, which, in many ways, is actually superior to its […]
When I first saw Peter Medak’s The Changeling in 1980, I was disappointed by it. I think now I was disappointed only because it wasn’t up to his masterpiece, The Ruling Class (1972) — but then very few films are up to that one, and very few filmmakers have ever made anything that good. And […]
“Are you watching closely?” reads the tagline for Christopher Nolan’s film of Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige. Judging by remarks I’ve overheard by viewers exiting the movie, I can only conclude that more than a few viewers aren’t taking the tagline to heart. Anyone planning on seeing this frequently remarkable, invariably fascinating film needs to […]
Much like Spider-Man, X-Men (2000) has suffered a certain amount of neglect owing to the existence of a superior sequel. In its case, though, it’s understandable since the sequel is vastly superior. Yet, it’s worth remembering that X2 (2003) is a sequel to a film that was pretty darn terrific in the first place. X2 […]
Tod Browning is one of the great mysteries of film history. His life story is filled with contradictions (some he created himself). No one argues the fact that he was the architect of the classic American horror film Dracula (1931), with Bela Lugosi as Dracula. His success is one that is grounded in his macabre […]
Exiting the theater where I’d just seen Barry Levinson’s Man of the Year, I overheard someone behind me liken Robin Williams’ character in the film to Ronald Reagan. While my basic response to that interpretation is one of head-shaking wonderment, I also think it’s a reading of the film that perfectly illustrates just how toothless […]
How can anyone not like a movie in which the heroine sees visions of St. Jude shimmering in the grime on her oven window (“Thank God, I ran out of Easy-Off,” she tells her priest)? Well, maybe there are those who can, but I’m not among them. First-time feature director Alejandro Springall and first-time screenwriter […]
I don’t think it’s entirely the fact that Sarah Michelle Gellar pegs out early on in the proceedings that I found The Grudge 2 slightly more appealing than its predecessor. Yes, it’s slapdash, silly rather than scary and almost completely incoherent (maybe that’s what Gellar meant when she once said she only chooses to make […]
So bad that it’s very nearly sublime, The Marine is easily the most enjoyable of the three mainstream movies that opened this week. The question of whether or not it’s enjoyable for any of the intended reasons is another matter, but in a week where I had to slog my way through The Grudge 2 […]
I got into considerable hot water with some readers for highly recommending this film when it first came out, so I’ll say from the onset that Bad Education (2004) is a full-blown NC-17 rated work that is dark and disturbing. It’s also a work that makes no bones about its gay sexual content (despite the […]
As a child of the Cold War era — you know, one of those kids who actually went through all the “duck and cover” and “don’t look at the blast” training exercises and got to tour a fall-out shelter on a school field trip at the age of 7 or 8 — I’ve only recently […]
