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“Margot at the Wedding owes more directly to the films of Woody Allen, though to the sort of Woody Allen picture that isn’t very popular…”

If Hotel Chevalier were nothing but just some short film, it couldn’t help but feel incurably slight; if I could only use two words to describe it, they would be “wide” and “yellow”.

On-line rental companies now offer democratized, unprecedented access to the annals of film history, but the copious selection can be a bit daunting and counterproductive: what, exactly, should you watch? This column hopes to help steer you towards good film and away from the bad.
At its outset, Clouzot’s Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la [...]

Well it’s about damn time! The First Season of Twin Peaks was released to the delight of fans way back in 2001, though infuriatingly sans the superlative pilot, which was for years only available in grainy VHS or international-region DVD versions.

The Darjeeling Limited has an undercurrent of emotional maturity beneath its hipster eccentricity; Wilson’s copious bandages are in fact a manifestation of his deep psychological scars.

Private Property (Nue Propri©t©, au francais) is conspicuously contemporary-French; anyone who’s seen some recent French character pieces like The Bridesmaid or The Piano Teacher should find its aesthetic style familiar, from the digital texture and the long takes to the uncomfortable suggestions of incestuous sexuality.

Death Proof opens on a pair of shapely feet, with polished toes, natch, resting on a sunlit dashboard. Tarantino needn’t even bother putting his name in the credits anymore.

Early on in Paranoid Park we see its adolescent protagonist, Gabe Nevins, from the rear as he walks towards a bench in an overgrown field to sit down and write something—a memoir? a letter?—that he calls “Paranoid Park”.

A character portrait, both epic and intimate, that studies the sexual lives of two men, friends, over the course of the mid to late Twentieth Century, Carnal Knowledge does nothing if not remind us that life in post-war America was a lot dirtier than we’re often led to believe.

The Assassination etc. etc. is sure to be miscategorized once it hits DVD; it’s a no bones Western, but it certainly doesn’t belong in the action section of the video store. Sure, it has an exciting train robbery sequence stuck into its opening reels, but the remainder of the film is short on shoot-em-up set-pieces, opting instead to be a meticulous study of the two eponymous characters’ simmering hostilities towards one another to the point of their boiling over.

Eastern Promises opens in the rain—oh, David Cronenberg’s in London again. This time, though, instead of dealing with the mentally ill and the ghosts that haunt them, as he did in Spider, he takes on the Russians, both assimilated, in the form of midwife Naomi Watts (whose character just broke up with her, gulp, black boyfriend), and unassimilated, in the form of the Russian Mafia (none of whom is black).

With The Host, Bong Joon-Ho has incontrovertibly affirmed his unrivaled talent as a contemporary reinventor of the classic American genre film. He’s an innovative traditionalist, as evidenced first in 2001 by Memories of Murder, the best cop movie of at least the last decade, and now he has reworked the monster movie the same way with The Host, the best monster movie at least since Hollywood effectively stopped making them (we’ll ignore the Godzilla remake, for example) all those decades ago.

There were some cries of heresy when certain cineastes caught wind of a Halloween remake/reimagining, as some people consider particular films, such as that one, to be sacrosanct. (Its many sequels, some of which I’d argue are surprisingly good, still do not impugn the integrity of the original.) While I personally don’t share that view of sanctification, I can sympathize with those wary of another Hollywood remake, especially of a horror film, when the past decade or so has seen an onslaught of vulgar cash-ins on familiar titles.

In political conversation nowadays the word “religious” tends to be immediately succeeded by the word “right”, and for those dismayed by the hijacking of Christianity to fight abortion but not to fight against war, director Anthony Giacchino, in his straight forward documentary The Camden 28, takes us back to once upon a time when there [...]

What can one hope to accomplish with the Western anymore? As a filmic genre, American and otherwise, it’s been a mainstay in moviehouses for nearly ninety years—to say nothing of its literary tradition—ever since Edwin Porter fired a pistol at audiences in his silent classic, The Great Train Robbery. To speak its vernacular, is there much territory left to mine?

Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild has the distinction of being the only book that I ever read straight through in a single day, a testament to the absorbing nature of the story and Kracauer’s journalistic acumen. Sean Penn’s filmic adaptation, on the other hand, might take you days to finish if at all, though it’s only (only!?!) 140 minutes, because of the constant temptation to walk out or shut it off, depending on the circumstances of your viewing.

Four trenchcoated older men with color-coded code names, wearing old-fashioned hats, black-rimmed glasses and ersatz mustaches, board a crowded downtown No. 6 train (called, by transit staff, “Pelham One-Two-Three” for its departure time and point of origin) stop by stop, starting at Fifty-Ninth Street. By Thirty-Third, they’ve overtaken the two conductors at gunpoint. (”I didn’t know these things went backwards!” exclaims one when no longer in control of his train.)

As it stands, Exiled makes a nice little trilogy of gangster (triad) films for Hong Kong director Johnnie To, but unfortunately it lacks the pensive grace that characterized his previous entry, Triad Election (aka Election 2.) This time around, To posits the gangster flick as a hybrid Western, set in the closest thing, in [...]

“This is really a great city, I don’t care what anyone says,” Woody Allen mutters earnestly over Manhattan’s well-known money-shot of the 59th St. Bridge and, thanks in large part to Gordon Willis’ magnificent photography, he really makes you believe it. Manhattan, kicking down the cobblestones on the heels of Allen’s much derided Interiors, is a return to the comedic form of the beloved (and Academy Award sweeping) Annie Hall, though with a matured voice; despite its poignancy, Annie Hall is, for the most part, tonally silly, while Manhattan plays more like Interiors with jokes. It’s about modern romance, New York City and the way the two intersect; as Allen says in the introduction, of his love for New York, the film’s “romanticized all out of proportion”.

Superbad distinguishes itself from all of its forefathers in that it lives up to the promise of its genre by actually being quite funny, and surpasses the ilk of American Pie, to which it bears superficial resemblance, by being well crafted dramatically to boot, avoiding rote bathos to achieve genuine poignancy.

“I’m your audience,” Ulrich M¼he confesses to an actress in a bar somewhere in the middle of The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), and he means it in two ways: one, he has seen her perform on the stage but two, he is a member of the Stasi, the secret police arm of [...]

Baby, I feel like something’s come between us, something like one one-hundredth of a millimeter of plastic sheeting. In Right at Your Door, a quasi-nuclear, quasi-apocalyptic quasi-thriller, a series of dirty bombs have exploded throughout Los Angeles; in the early morning, the biggest problem in the lives of Angelinos, according to the radio, was knowing “how organic your organic vegetables really are”, but now, by mid-morning, it’s something a bit more serious: encroaching, airborne (inorganic) toxins.

Something Wild, a bizarre love story—and not really in an interesting way—doesn’t quite provide what its title or trailer promises; it’s more like Something Weird and Too Long. It opens with New York tableaus characterized by (often symmetrical) patterns, whether it’s traipsing pedestrians, soaring pigeon flocks, moving traffic or the schematic arrangement of high-rise [...]

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Werner Herzog, as the prolific documentarian that he’s become, tried his hand at the faux-documentary. Well, why not? “Mockumentary” would be the wrong word to describe The Wild Blue Yonder, despite its familiarity and wide usage, as there’s rarely a hint of humor [...]

On-line rental companies now offer democratized, unprecedented access to the annals of film history, but the copious selection can be a bit daunting and counterproductive: what, exactly, should you watch? This column hopes to help steer you towards good film and away from the bad.
The “Edward Norton Rule of Making It” states that all up-and-coming, [...]

The Russian-born, English-raised, American-living movie producer protagonist of The Abandoned, Anastasia Hille, says at the beginning, in voice-over, “the past was another country now, best forgotten.” But, unable to leave well-enough alone, she returns to the country of her birth two days shy of the forty second anniversary of her mother’s vicious murder—and her [...]

At 3-Iron (aka Bin-Jip)’s conclusion, a quotation on the screen declares that: “it’s hard to tell whether the world we live in is a reality or a dream.” While, personally, I have no misgivings in believing that my own existence is not some somnambulistic illusion, it’s nevertheless an appropriate aphorism with which to conclude [...]

When you see Roman Duris staring directly into the camera at the start of Dans Paris (the third movie of the summer about Paris, set in Paris and with “Paris” in the title), it’s easy, while considering the film’s French origins, to assume with heavy heart that this is going to be one of [...]

28 Days Later opens as A Clockwork Orange with monkeys, with images of large-scale, international violence being played on several contiguous monitors and watched by a constrained ape. The ape is part of a medical research project soon interrupted by animal rights activists intent on freeing the prisoners; while their idealism might be sympathetic, [...]

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in footage at the outset of No End in Sight, says that the War in Iraq is “complex for people to understand,” the implication being that we shouldn’t even try. Thankfully, though, Charles Ferguson has laid it all out in a cogent manner so that all may understand, outlining, in dissecting essay format with the aid of journalists, academics, soldiers and, most fascinatingly, former administration officials, the indisputable failures of the war’s execution.