It’s rare that I’m at a loss for words, but this particular … whatever-it-is called TV Carnage: A Sore for Sighted Eyes leaves me more than a little perplexed. Oh, I know — broadly speaking — what it is: about 70 minutes of bizarre clips from movies and TV shows and adverts and PSAs and […]
For a brief period — roughly from this 1972 release till 1978’s The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain — Lina Wertmuller was the darling of the art house crowd. All Screwed Up, Love and Anarchy, Swept Away… by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of […]
When the trailer for this movie first appeared, my comrade-in-reviewing, Marcianne Miller, was quick to send me an e-mail reading, “Don’t you even think of assigning me Little Man.” This is known as a pre-emptive strike — and a wise move it was. No, Little Man isn’t the worst movie of the summer. That’s too […]
This oddity from famed filmmaker Fritz Lang was a one-shot affair made in France between his departure from Germany and his career in Hollywood. For years, the film only seemed to exist in a cut and non-subtitled version that was often mistakenly assumed to be the French language version of the almost never seen 1930 […]
The great Indian director Satyajit Ray chose this charming, small-scale human drama (with decided comedic overtones) as his swan song, and a more fitting end to his career could hardly be imagined. Working from a very simple concept — a great uncle (Utpal Dutt) missing for 35 years returns to visit a niece (Mamata Shankar), […]
I was too young at 13 for The Graduate when it was released in 1967, and by the time I caught up with it on a 13-inch TV in a 1970s dorm room, in a hideous-looking, pan-and-scan and editedversion, , I was merely baffled by its reputation. Seeing the film as Mike Nichols originally intended, […]
As Street Fighter should have been to Raul Julia, who died not long after appearing in that 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme opus, this film version of the long-running Broadway play ought to have proven a great lesson to director Michael Ritchie. The lesson? Be careful, you never know what film will be your last. OK, […]
Your fondness for — not to say tolerance of — The Devil and Daniel Johnston will probably depend on how deeply you embrace grunge rock and the concept that all artists are insane. Its subject/hero Daniel Johnston is first seen being introduced at a concert as the “greatest singer-songwriter alive today,” an appellation that filmmaker […]
There are so many things that are right with Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest that it seems a shame not to be able to rank it as high as his first film (in what will ultimately be a trilogy), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The problem […]
This Tim Burton-produced film version of Roald Dahl’s children’s book kicks off a series of free screenings of Burton films at Pack Memorial Library. It’s not quite up to the filmmaker’s usual standard, but it still has much to recommend it as an example of intelligently and creatively bringing a book to the screen. Burton’s […]
Michalangelo Antonioni’s first color film, The Red Desert (1964), could be called a film for persons who found The Passenger too straightforward and cheery. In some ways, this is Art House 101 stuff — the kind of movie you just know is good for you, because it’s so damn dull and depressing. It’s cinema as […]
Viewed dispassionately, this probably ought to get decked at least a half-star for plot predictability alone. I mean, here’s the pitch :Awkward journalism grad Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) comes to the big city where she lands a job as personal assistant to high-powered fashion magazine editrix Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), despite the fact that she […]
Despite the fact that I could happily go the rest of my life without seeing another in the seemingly endless procession of superhero comic book movies, I had awaited Superman Returns with some anticipation. True, Superman is far and away the dullest of comic book characters. He completely lacks the darker side inherent in Batman, […]
It would be unwise to approach Josef von Baky’s 1943 Munchhausen expecting anything like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the 1988 Terry Gilliam film adapted from the same material. Despite having a few similarities, this “German Wizard of Oz” is a very different kettle of winged monkeys. It was made in Germany during World War […]
The title of this documentary just about says it all. Davis Guggenheim’s film of Al Gore’s campaign to make the problem of global warming better understood and recognized presents a truth that is indeed inconvenient to a great many people — people who will probably never see the movie. I have friends who would benefit […]
What happens when you combine the director of the 2001 Mariah Carey disaster, Glitter, with a former underwear model? In the case of Waist Deep, you end up with a surprisingly decent B-movie — with a penchant for absurdity. While never reaching the sublime ridiculousness of, say, Wayne Kramer’s recent movie, Running Scared, the makers […]
The jury is still out (and probably always will be) as to whether The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries is Ingmar Bergman’s greatest film. For me, it depends largely on my mood of the moment — today, I’d lean toward The Seventh Seal. It is hard to deny that The Seventh Seal is the film […]
The period from the late 1960s to early 1970s was one of filmmaking’s most adventurous eras. Films that were unthinkable a few years earlier were being made by filmmakers ready to test the new “permissiveness” of the ratings system. Unfortunately, a number of these films were made for short-lived production companies and have subsequently drifted […]
There’s something more than a little bit ironic that a movie preaching the gospel of the value of having nothing should rake in a projected $40 million on its opening weekend. Yes, the latest Adam Sandler assault on the art of film is one of those films — the kind where multi-millionaires explain to you […]
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 […]
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) […]
