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 […]
This is not, technically, a review. More of a general impression some weeks after seeing it. Yes, it’s overlong and repetitive. While never boring, you often laugh and are disturbed at the same time. The lead character, Jordan Belfort, is – and this is saying something – the most repellant scumbag ever to be in […]
Let me say right off that I enjoyed this film, with one strong reservation. The Coen brothers know how to present their quirky charmers, and how to make us care what happens to them. Oscar Isaac plays a young folk singer in Greenwich Village, 1961, and the milieu is so perfectly rendered that I felt I could walk through […]
Alexander Payne’s new film demonstrates the artistic virtues of modesty. His last two films, as well made as they were, disappointed: with About Schmidt, a loose meandering narrative winds up woefully pretentious; but with his next film, The Descendents, a tighter focus didn’t help because the dramatic payoff was so weak. Finally, Payne discovers his strengths […]
