The rare and special sequel that is not only worse than its predecessors but that makes its predecessors seem worse too. Seem, more exactly, to have been not worth the bother. Set in an extraterrestrial penal colony and crackpot religious sanctuary, where the shaven-headed inmates call each other "wankers" among …
The central conceit, and little else, has been retained from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story of the same name: a protagonist who ages in reverse. (The story of course was written and titled before the soundalike name of Benjamin Britten came to fame, and as long as they were …
Director David Fincher, loaded with don't-try-this-at-home ideas on how to prove yourself a man and not a mouse, traces a course of anti-Establishment insurgency, from small acts of personal liberation (peeing in the lobster bisque, splicing a frame of male genitals into the middle of a kiddie film) to organizing …
Thoroughly dishonest thriller centered around a forty-eighth-birthday gift certificate (brother to brother, Sean Penn to Michael Douglas, dimpled chin to jutted jaw) redeemable at a low-profile outfit called Consumer Recreation Services. The particular service offered therefrom is spelled out cryptically as "a profound life experience" and "an experiential Book-of-the-Month Club," …
Not bad, for an unnecessary remake. I’ll gladly make do with a shortening of the misogynistic revenge-rape in exchange for a more cuddly relationship between the cop (Daniel Craig) and the girl who fell face first into a tackle box (Rooney Mara). The smooth lateral pans and flat, shiny surfaces …
A long and twisty argument for the notion that somewhere along the way, talented, high-style director David Fincher stopped liking people: the characters onscreen, the souls in the theater, even the abstract mass of humanity. Pathology still interests him, though, and so we get toxic parents, toxic lovers, toxic siblings, …
Published in 1966, Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut was the first book to take a title-by-title approach to exploring a director’s career. It also made it cool to like Alfred Hitchcock. A Hollywood master and an internationally acclaimed Parisian newcomer couldn’t have been more diverse, but Hitch, instantly sensing a fellow …
Edward Norton, making his directorial debut, shares screen time with Ben Stiller in the roles of boyhood pals who've gone separate but parallel ways -- priest and rabbi -- as hip, happening, new, now, popular, popularizing, palm-slapping types of clergymen. In short, "the God Squad." Then the Third Musketeer from …
After his Fight Club, The Game, and Seven, David Fincher's next step is apt to seem a rather modest and old-fashioned thriller: a straightforward damsel-in-distress thing, two damsels to be exact, a well-compensated divorcée with mild claustrophobia and her diabetic daughter, holed up together in an impregnable secret chamber -- …
2011 saw the United States release of Love Crime, a French corporate-erotic thriller starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier as a couple of hot lesbians, er, as a couple of professional women who get entangled in less than professional ways. Now, just two years later, Brian De Palma is …
A metropolitan murder mystery that, in the Golden Age of the detective novel, might well have appealed to Ellery Queen: somebody is killing people in graphic illustration of the Seven Deadly Sins, and littering the crime scenes with quotations from Milton, Shakespeare, etc. We do not now, naturally, have an …
Everything you never wanted to know about the advent of Facebook, where “friends” gather on the Internet. An amorphous series of flashbacks from the depositions of two separate lawsuits takes you through the steps by which a socially inept (how ironic!) Harvard computer nerd stumbled upon “a once-in-a-generation holy-shit idea” …