The Lake House is a good film that is nearly a very good film, even if it never quite flirts with greatness. Even granting that it’s a deeply flawed work on several levels, the thing that ultimately keeps it from being more than good is simply that director Alejandro Agresti and screenwriter David Auburn (Proof) […]
One of the more perplexing mysteries of modern studio practices is just why Dreamworks Pictures abandoned The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, a 2005 release that played on a mere handful of screens to mixed (though often glowing) reviews. It boasted a box-office draw in both star Julianne Moore and its popular literary source that […]
It’s been a good 16 years since I last saw Richard Donner’s 1976 film The Omen. I found it then as I found it on its original release — unpersuasive, shakily conceived, cheesy and mostly notable for the sight of two major stars, Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, slumming in a more than usually preposterous […]
With John Hillcoat’s The Proposition one is faced with a curious dilemma. The film is certainly well made. It’s weirdly compelling. There’s a great deal of evident artistry in both Hillcoat’s direction and Nick Cave’s screenplay. Plus, there are several noteworthy performances. But having said all that, the film is also unregenerately unpleasant — to […]
An unusual film to come from indie filmmaker John Sayles, The Secret of Roan Inish is completely out of keeping with the generally cynical tone of his other work. Sayles is the last person on Earth you’d expect to be making a “family film,” but that might be part of the reason this 1995 film […]
Water marks the third film in Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s “Elements” trilogy, following Earth (1998) and Fire (1996). (It would seem that a tetralogy including “air” might be more inclusive elementally speaking, but that’s a separate issue.) I can’t speak to the quality of the first two, never having seen them, but it’s apparent that […]
The marriage of 81-year-old filmmaker Robert Altman and 63-year-old writer-performer Garrison Keillor has produced the first film of 2006 that I can honestly — without qualification of any kind — say I love. However, it’s not just a relative thing since I can count the films of 2006 that I’ve even liked very much on […]
Considered in 1979 one of the great follies of all time — over budget, overlong, overstated — Francis Ford Coppola’s attempt to look at the Vietnam War in terms of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has come full circle (in various forms) to emerge as possibly the most significant film ever made about war. That […]
A case could be made that Chaplin’s 1917 film Easy Street is the greatest of all his early work. It is certainly his most ambitious — seeming less a short film than a feature done in shorthand. Often remembered today for the iconic image of Chaplin subduing the villain (Eric Campbell) by gassing him with […]
One of the undisputed classics of modern international film, 8 1/2 (its title literally meaning that it was Federico Fellini’s eight-and-one-halfth film — seven full features and a couple short segments of omnibus films precede it) is the movie where the greatest of all Italian filmmakers moved completely away from traditional realism toward a more […]
Peter Weir is not one of my favorite filmmakers. I was baffled by the acclaim his 1977 film, The Last Wave (my first exposure to his work), received and even more perplexed when I read Weir’s explanation of the film’s ending — that the final freeze frame of Richard Chamberlain symbolized the impending end of […]
Unrelenting in its sheer awfulness, the romantic comedy known as The Break-Up boasts neither romance, nor comedy. In its stead, this cinematic version of the famed Chinese water torture invites the viewer to spend most of its 107 minutes (trust me, it feels at least twice that long) trapped with two singularly unlikable characters fighting. […]
When you watch upwards of 200 movies a year because your job demands it, it’s not often that you get to watch movies just because you want to. That’s one of the beauties of local film societies. Not only are they good for the community, offering viewers the chance to expand on their cinematic literacy […]
I am often considered to be a cynical curmudgeon and even an elitist bastard — the latter, I think, mostly because I prefer, say, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou to Ron Burgundy: Anchorman. The charges have some merit; I wouldn’t argue the point. I am, however, not sufficiently cynical, curmudgeonly or elitist to be […]
Wings is primarily famous today as the first-ever Best Picture Oscar-winner, which sounds a bit more impressive than it is, since the awards for 1927-28 seem to have been pitched to give everybody something. Wings may have won Best Picture for overall production, but it sat side-by-side with F.W. Murnau’s far better Sunrise, which won […]
Bryan Singer’s X2 was the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas and, yes, even the lobster’s dinner shirt of comic-book movies. But it was ludicrous to think that a third entry helmed by Brett Ratner — known for the Rush Hour franchise, and as a Hollywood party boy and an egotist without a cause — would […]
When the Dardenne Brothers’ The Son appeared in 2003, those critics who reviewed it ran out of superlatives. Roger Ebert found it “assured and flawless.” Andrew Sarris couldn’t help “being stirred by the wildly melodramatic climax” and the “thunderously quiescent Zen Buddhist conclusion.” I understand where they’re coming from, even while thinking enthused hyperbole has […]
It will be seen by many as another case of preaching to the choir. And to some extent that’s true, but that’s also true of most documentaries. Let’s face it, folks who were planning on voting for George W. Bush were not the ones lining up around the block to see Fahrenheit 9/11. Similarly, the […]
Michael Apted’s 1979 film — his conjecture as to what might have happened during the 11-day disappearance in 1926 of mystery novelist Agatha Christie — is one of the overlooked gems of ’70s filmmaking. It may not be Apted’s best film, but it is almost certainly his most visually sumptuous — thanks in no small […]
I suppose a case could be made that See No Evil more or less accomplishes what it sets out to do: hole up its no-name cast in a decrepit hotel and have them offed one by one by a 6-foot-9-inch pro-wrestler in various excessively anti-social ways. The goal, as you can see, is not terribly […]
First of all, is this a movie or a controversy? I choose to think it’s a movie first and a controversy second. I also believe that anyone whose faith can be undermined by a Ron Howard picture was on pretty shaky ground, belief-wise, to begin with. No, I haven’t read the book (though it’s sitting […]
