Movie Reviews
During the Great Depression, films were good at lifting spirits. Quite often, life at the movies really was like a bowl of cherries. Cherries included W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Bette Davis, Mickey Mouse, Mae …
True Grit Jeff Bridges’s work with the Coen brothers in The Big Lebowski is well known, and as his Academy Award for Crazy Heart shows, he is no slouch in a cowboy persona. But to …
Confronting the multiplex tree of holiday goodies, I hang some critical tinsel, if not very much good news: How Do You Know Reese Witherspoon is now a womanly 34. Paul Rudd is 41, Owen Wilson …
In Hollywood terms, Christmas is, like the Golden Globes, only a glittering harbinger of the Oscars. With the gifts starting to pile up, we venture boldly: The King’s Speech As masters of speech, British actors …
Burlesque Christina (howl like it hurts) Aguilera plays Ali, short for Alice, a cute-as-pie Iowa waitress with aspirations of Sunset Strip stardom. By means of contrived necessity (that is to say, she walks by the …
Movies invade us, and we invade them. It’s a personal transaction. When the Harry Potter film series launched, my children were close to the ages of kid Harry and his new chums at the Hogwarts …
Duncan Shepherd filled this column for 38 years. I step in with gratitude (he asked) and with serene confidence that I will not be writing in 2048. “Style,” said Susan Sontag, “is the principle of …
It had to end sometime. Now’s as bad a time as any. After thirty-eight years of them — commencing with a typo-marred encomium on Hickey and Boggs dated November 2, 1972 — this is to …
Granted, Clint Eastwood in his senior years has demonstrated a remarkable readiness to broaden his boundaries as a director. A quick check of his filmography will show that as long ago as his middle-aged Breezy, …
Trepidation is not the ideal frame of mind in which to approach a film, even around Halloween. But after I Stand Alone and Irreversible, the French enfant terrible Gaspar Noé merits nothing less and nothing …
Sort of a Sorry, Wrong Number for the cellphone age, Buried is a gimmicky thriller whose single gimmick, if you have not been tipped off beforehand, dawns on you with a mounting sensation of hopelessness …
Everything you never wanted to know about the advent of Facebook, where “friends” gather on the Internet, will be revealed in The Social Network. That’s not to say you will understand it. Structured as an …
Ben Affleck’s second directed film, The Town, is a moderately diverting, mildly despicable game of cops-and-robbers that counts, in its play for the spectator’s sympathies, on the moral depravity of the public at large, a …
For your Mafia fix, you can safely go to The Sicilian Girl, a fictionalized factual story from the fatherland, focussed on (at the start) the ten-year-old daughter of a soon murdered mob boss, slowly simmering …
Top of the heap this week, The Tillman Story rehashes the shameful facts of how Pat Tillman, Jr., the Arizona Cardinal who set aside a professional football career to enlist in the Army post-9/11, had …
They don’t call them the dog days for nothing. Blockbusters are all behind us. Here’s what’s before us. The Switch. Thin-ice romantic comedy tolerable only insofar as you can tolerate the greased wheels of contrivance …