This film has received the best reviews of the year. There is much speculation about its Oscar chances, and many consider it the “popular” breakthrough that its writer-director, Richard Linklater, has been waiting for after over twenty years as an obscure independent, albeit with an international reputation. As most indie followers know by now, it […]
This summertime comedy from last year tries to plug-in to the “coming of age” meme that sends adults back to the time, when they were young, that will be remembered, fondly, for the feelings and experiences they think actually happened, and wish they could experience all over again, even though, at the time, they destroyed […]
STORY: A thirtyish couple with their first baby like sex and weed and, of course, baby. They don’t think much about money, the future or any of those boring “grownup” things. Just sex, weed and baby. But one day, a fraternity buys the house next to theirs and starts having loud, crazy sex, booze and […]
This film has been getting a lot of attention as a daring, innovative experiment, but it’s really just a variation on a genre that goes back decades. I call it “techno-stunt” because it tells a story involving many people by having the camera stay on a single character for almost the entire running time. Here […]
This is a fun show, especially for those who enjoy the frothy-light kind of musical that was popular before the genre was taken seriously by critics. The story was second to the singing, dancing and the laughs, and the composers, even the greatest like Kern and Gershwin, had to accept that. The cleverest thing about […]
This film makes good use of what has become a cliché in crime films: the hero, seemingly trapped in a drug deal, gets out of the jam and turns the tables on the mob. We bought this wildly improbable premise as far back as John Guare’s script for Louis Malle’s Atlantic City. I’m buying it […]
This film is a hit in Italy, and early response is positive at the Tribeca Film Festival. The audience seemed enthusiastic, although there’s likely a buzz factor when the director and the two glamorous lead actresses show up. The prologue shows a bicyclist struck by a car at night, with the car just driving off. […]
Would you pay to see a film that was called an allegory about the sexual repression of women in a male-dominated culture? I wouldn’t. But if, instead, you were shown a near naked Scarlett Johansson as an alien creature luring men to death during sex, you just might. Welcome to a growing genre I will […]
This is the only film I caught at this year’s New Directors?New Films series. Before the film started, the director, a slight, appealing young German named Ramon Zurcher, thanked us for coming and wished us “good projection”. Unfortunately, I found nothing as charming or as amusing as that in the film. Set entirely in a […]
This is not a review. This is a unique and wonderful film, but we all know that. I came to appreciate it late because I have a long-standing aversion to “angel” stories, especially when heavenly forces help good to triumph over evil. But IAWL is not sentimental in the sugary sense. It’s hard-nosed and often […]
