The chill comes off the screen. Ice hangs from the roofs and tree limbs. Frost covers the ground. The girl is in a boat, drifting…
Not many films possess the mindset of a black widow — eager to lure you in, chew you up, and spit you out as if…
Mia Hansen-Løve wears many creative hats; actress, film critic, screenwriter, and director. After starring in two of fiancé Oliver Assayas’s films in her late teens,…
“A crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum…
A witless, calculated attempt to start another Pirates of the Caribbean-style franchise (this one based on a video game series), Mike Newell’s Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Prince…
In wildly different ways, Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl and The Last Mistress envision the collective invasion of the female psyche by male oppressors. In both,…
Neil Jordan is one of those directors whose reputation mysteriously exceeds his productivity. Few of his films stand out as anything more than thrill or…
The films of writer/director Nicole Holofcener are trim and personal, lit with the light of real life and warmed by the friction of relationships bumping…
At this point, it seems fair to say that Jonathan Demme is the finest director of concert documentaries working today. Where most are content to…
In Remember Me, Robert Pattinson’s voiceover twice cites a possibly-apocryphal quote by Gandhi: “Whatever you do in life will be insignificant. But it’s very important…
“This is not a shortcut to the other side,” reads a sign on the wall of an occupied Baghdad palace during a particularly dull walk-n-talk…
The Runaways’ place in rock history is slight at best. They occupy a buried patch between feminal compatriots Patti Smith and the Go-Go’s and a…
There’s something to be said for the achievement of a modest goal. Kevin Smith has stated that his reasoning behind directing Cop Out was that he…
Frederick Wiseman’s latest doc was designed with the precision of an arabesque and contains a lesson on just how much precision an arabesque actually requires.…
Martin Scorsese has been letting us down for years, helming the sort of film that was roasted in 1992’s The Player, but which still gets…
Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air feels like a sales pitch, and thanks to the film’s manipulative powers, we actually start to believe that a…
You think your life is hard? Sure, we all have problems, but Precious has it worse than most of us. An illiterate Harlem teenager with…
Plenty, this writer included, are pretty hard on Nicolas Cage. He’s one of those actors whose films I eventually had to avoid because of my…
Clint Eastwood’s old-school approach to filmmaking has never been more inexpressive than in Invictus, a shallow adaptation of John Carlin’s book, Playing the Enemy. The…
To term something a “festival film” can be patronizing — it pigeonholes a movie as one with very limited audience appeal. These are usually from…