Movie Reviews
One of the promises of the independent cinema, seldom fulfilled, is that it take up the jobs abdicated by today’s Hollywood. The job taken up in Cairo Time is, no condescension intended, that of the …
Todd Solondz has described his Life during Wartime as a “quasi-sequel” to Happiness. This is helpful inasmuch as it has been a dozen years since the quasi-predecessor, and although I think of that one as …
Lowering the temperature on the Cold War, below freezing, Salt exposes a subterranean population of Russian “sleeper” agents with far more nefarious designs than those of the eleven happy capitalists rounded up recently (and for …
Acclamations of genius plus megamillions at the box-office equal a license for self-indulgence. Case at hand: critical favorite Christopher Nolan plus popular favorite The Dark Knight equal Inception. To all those responsible, filmmaker and favorers …
Pardon my priorities. Now that Alain Resnais has been addressed in timely fashion, I am able to double-back and attend to a matter of greater public concern. Tens if not dozens of readers will have …
The first if not the most remarkable thing about Wild Grass is the simple fact that it will open locally, at the Ken on Friday. The last Alain Resnais film to do so, also at …
Latest outflow from the sluggish mainstream and the rushing tributaries: Winter’s Bone. Debra Granik’s top-prize recipient at this year’s Sundance festival, a poky, low-key, somewhat parsimonious rural thriller with a simple set-up: if absent Dad, …
Pixar’s Toy Story 3, or if it makes any difference Lee Unkrich’s Toy Story 3, adds little but minutes to the previous sequel, and for a computer-animated children’s film it adds quite a lot of …
Faced with The A-Team and The Karate Kid, or going back to pick up the slighted Get Him to the Greek and Marmaduke, I did what any free-willed film fan would do: went to the …
In my years at this post, there have been no fewer than three re-releases of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. (A measure, some might suggest, of a too long length of time.) The latest one, at the …
Summer got started without me. Let’s see what I’ve missed. Iron Man 2, to take the first thing first, serves a sequel’s purpose; it gives the sheep somewhere to go and get clipped. No one …
Back when Kathryn Bigelow was having, or about to have, her historic victory as Best Director on Oscar night, we were hearing some dire statistics about the percentage of female directors in the grand total. …
Had I consented to watch my DVD screener of The Square, there would have been more than a couple of days left in its solo week at the Ken Cinema before I could say that …
The Academy Award for foreign film is historically a hard one to handicap. That’s because the voters in that category must meet the requirement of actually seeing the nominees, all five of them, in effect …
We seem to have entered a brief period of frenzy between the pre-Oscar stasis and the slow summer pace of one blockbuster per week. I’m keeping up as best I can. Kick-Ass. Alias Smart-Ass, a …
Something to live for (now that March Madness has passed): the new Alain Resnais film, Wild Grass, new as of the Cannes film festival last May, has popped up on the Landmark schedule for the …