Movie Reviews
The surprise winner (as we are all obliged to call it) of this year’s Oscar for foreign film, the Japanese Departures, is somewhat less surprising when you see it. That’s not to say it’s a …
With two blockbusters in a single week — Terminator Salvation, alias T4, and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian — the summer sequels would appear to have leaped over the prequels. (Siding with, …
While the mainstream has wound down to its summer speed of one blockbuster per week, the alternative cinema has been spewing out counterprogramming aplenty, some of it by big fish. The Limits of Control is …
And so begins the summer of ’09: prequel, prequel. The first of these, opening Friday last, is X-Men Origins: Wolverine, entrusted to director Gavin Hood of little Tsotsi from South Africa. (How much say does …
Report from the front: pressure mounting, resistance weakening, defenses leaking. Try as I might to hold the line, more and more movies in recent months and years, mainly movies of the “alternative” as distinct from …
At last a bone to gnaw on. Not a very meaty bone, only a very scrappy bone, but a bone nonetheless. State of Play, the Americanization of a BBC miniseries, qualifies as a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller, …
For some years now, whenever Rialto Pictures (it usually was) had selected a foreign film for theatrical reissue, I was given to wonder when they’d get around to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Deuxième Souffle, known in …
To feel affection for the grade-Z science-fiction films of the Fifties, especially as their descendants get ever more deluxe, is perfectly natural and no cause for shame. (A Not-Guilty Pleasure.) To set out in the …
From where I sat, the San Diego Latino Film Festival peaked early. (Probably the whole year did.) The first film I saw, on opening night, was my most anticipated film, Carlos Saura’s Fados. It turns …
How high can the escalation go? Watchmen is just another step on the stairs, one or two above The Dark Knight, nothing to get worked up about one way or the other. Adapted from “the …
It all began with the death in mid-December of Van Johnson. As is my wont, I found something in the Los Angeles Times obituary to grumble about at the breakfast table: no mention of The …
Steven Soderbergh’s atonement for the Ocean’s capers: a four-and-a-half-hour worship service in honor of Che Guevara, conducted in Spanish with English subtitles. Or rather, if Full Frontal and Solaris were atonement for ...Eleven, and Bubble …
Fresh from the Jewish Film Festival, Avi Nesher’s The Secrets starts a theatrical engagement this Friday at the Reading Gaslamp. (Not to be confused with the singular A Secret, also Jewish-themed, that played there in …
As an explanation of romantic incompatibility, the catchphrase title, He’s Just Not That into You, is stunningly unilluminating, no matter which of its six words is stressed. (On screen, the third one stands out in …
Although movies had been set in Minnesota before Fargo (notwithstanding its misleading North Dakota title), movies as disparate as The Farmer’s Daughter, The Heartbreak Kid, Purple Rain, Grumpy Old Men, it was the Coen brothers …
The dim month after the year-end Oscar drive — Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Bride Wars, The Unborn, Notorious, My Bloody Valentine, Inkheart, Outlander, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, et al. — looked to be brightened …