Movie Reviews
Should anyone be suffering symptoms of withdrawal as the “Seen on DVD” column gears down from weekly to monthly, let me share the latest accretions to my own spotty collection. I don’t purchase DVDs often …
It takes a bit of cheek to call a film Flawless. Especially a Demi Moore film. In it, she carries that affixed chip on her shoulder into the role of the sole female executive at …
Two Mondays ago I saw two films. In the morning was the advance screening of the American indie, Snow Angels, scheduled to open locally a week from Friday. I should probably, by custom, wait till …
Attention all masochists. Funny Games is not what it sounds like. Not fun and games, not funny ha-ha, not charades and Mad Libs. It is Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own Austrian film of …
Extracted from a fat Philippa Gregory novel (the novel, that is, is fat), The Other Boleyn Girl doles out yet another installment in the long-running royal soap opera. Think of it as Elizabeth: The Genesis, …
Full plate, half-heartedly picked at: Be Kind Rewind. Twisted, tangled, snarled zaniness around a behind-the-times video store, facing foreclosure, in Passaic, N.J. An habitué of the place (Jack Black, at his most demonically possessed) unwittingly …
Scouring the upcoming schedule for Landmark Theatres, from now through May, I find no mention of the current reissue of Alain Resnais’s 1961 Last Year at Marienbad, one of the smallest handful of films that …
Thanks to an attractive cast, the creamy cinematography of John Bailey, and the light touch of writer and first-time director Jeff Lowell, Over Her Dead Body is an uncommonly pleasant romantic-comic fantasy, in the Blithe …
By practice and principle, the Oscar nominations are not an occasion for me, as they are for so many in my fraternity, to guess the winners, to lament the omitted, or to fill out an …
No matter how generally annoying a technical innovation or stylistic vogue might be (the telephoto lens, the zoom shot, rack focus, etc.), there will always come along a movie to show how it can be …
And now for something completely different. Persepolis, from France and in French, is a cartoon recap of the comic-strip memoir by Marjane Satrapi, covering her childhood in Iran under (and then out from under) the …
Underfoot in the Christmas rush: Margot at the Wedding is Noah Baumbach's somewhat disappointing follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, though maybe not so disappointing if proper heed had been taken of his slovenly …
If their powers are fully on display, it's only because, paradoxically, their powers are held partly in reserve.
It was for just such situations that we have coined the expression "no-brainer."