Though made in 2010, Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables has more in common with action pictures of days gone by. That’s not to say that the film is marooned in the late ’80s, and Stallone seems aware of how far removed the days of Rambo and Commando are from…
Female cinematic incarnations have long played second fiddle to subjective male visions of lust, intoxication, and regret, collectively narrow interpretations that often disavow a woman’s perspective altogether. Arzner, Lupino, Varda, Akerman, Breillat, and Campion have tipped the scales closer to equality, but the terrible fact remains that movies…
Edgar Wright is a man at home in pop culture. Despite a winking self-awareness of the tropes that drive their genres, his first two feature films (Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) evidence an appreciation and understanding of their forms that goes far beyond snide post-modern irony.…
Some fathers are born, some are made, and some were never meant to be. Jorge Machado, a Mayan fisherman, was evidently born to be a father—every motion and facial tick suggests as much under the proving stare of Pedro González-Rubio’s lens. Alamar (aka To the Sea) is a…
Most of us are loathe to admit it, but the job of a film critic is, more often than not, that of a glorified publicist. The best among us aspire to more—to enlightenment, to intellectual engagement, to the communication of everything this oh-so-young artistic medium is capable of…
Even at the ripe old age of 88, Alain Resnais’s filmmaking engine seems to have an endless supply of creative fuel left. Like clockwork, Resnais churns out a film every four years or so and if his latest offering is any indication, the auteur hasn’t lost the diabolical…
Most films never expand past their 16:9 rectangular tombs, passively projecting until they inevitably fade to black. But a film like I Am Love transcends these boundaries and exists beyond the screen. Luca Guadagnino’s epic melodrama shifts and squirms, pushes and pulls like an organism demanding evolution, challenging…
It’s an ironic kind of blessing when the tag “Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films present” is appended to a film’s opening titles. You know to brace yourself on seeing it. The casual moviegoer can step outside — forewarned is forearmed — but the reviewer can’t do…
Not many films possess the mindset of a black widow — eager to lure you in, chew you up, and spit you out as if it were second nature. Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me is like that edacious arachnid, a purveyor of psychopathy in its most lurid form…
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 gimmick, but they’re often garbed in a thick drape of aesthetic matter that makes them look fuller than they are, and which helps…
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 that you do it because no one else will.” By the second appearance of this quote, it has been rendered hideously ironic by…
After a yearlong delay, a replacement director, heavy reshoots, and multiple editors, The Wolfman is probably about as good as it could possibly be. It gets quite a bit right, adding up to a solid B-horror offering that delivers more than a few pleasures during its lean, 100-minute…
More vampires? Really? Is that what we need? You can’t swing a bat at the multiplex these days without hitting one, though it could be worse. We could be facing an onslaught of Matthew McConaughey romantic comedies (now that’s scary). The good news is that Daybreakers is a…
The Twilight Saga: New Moon hardly needs an introduction. As the second film in the massively popular vampmance series, courtesy of author Stephanie Meyer, New Moon earned high expectations thanks to one of the most extensive and hormone-centric marketing campaigns in recent memory. The first Twilight caught plenty…
When I was in third grade, I discovered my love for writing while penning an essay about Amelia Earhart. I vividly remember sitting at my kitchen table, reading about her adventures in an encyclopedia, and mythologizing both her existence as a 1930s aviatrix and her legendary disappearance. She…
Ricky Gervais has ample amount of personality and charm. He made the British version of The Office into the cult hit it has become, and he made last year’s Ghost Town at the very least enjoyable. A well-seasoned actor and writer, Gervais’ logical next step would be feature…
Steven Soderbergh made an interesting choice in telling the story of Mark Whitacre, the agri-food exec who turned informant and paid a price. Part fraud, part whistleblower, Whitacre is a heady topic for the screen — one that, in most hands, would have been dramatized for maximum fustian,…
All tearjerkers are not created equal. This is a point too rarely acknowledged. When it comes to pocket-sized tragedies, those tidy doses of Hollywood-friendly catharsis, it tends to be an open and shut case for most folks: either you’re in the mood for a good cry or that…
Scary notion: what if YouTube, with its streaming transmissions of home-movie inanity and fleeting flashes of sign o’ the times import, was our first and only source of pure, uncut, unfiltered reality? What if those little snippets of amateur verité — the camera confessions, the clowning around, the…
The work of Parisian auteur Claire Denis has been cause célébre for many film critics over the last two decades. Her adoring supporters do backflips with the arrival of each one of her films, while detractors bemoan her frequent tendency to favor oblique narratives and veiled expressions (read:…
Adaptation is the medium of our time. For better or worse, appropriation has devolved from oxymoronic theories of postmodernism into a more practical mode of replication. With films in mind, when, if ever, will this market driven habit of re-mining used material will run aground? The most confounding…