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Brendon Bouzard

WALL*E
By Brendon Bouzard | July 4, 2008

As much as Wall*E is Chaplinesque, he is also the Chaplin of the 1930s, the one who, awash in cultural and financial capital, decided to expend it on a pair of politically engaged problem films, Modern Times and The Great Dictator.

My Brother Is an Only Child
By Brendon Bouzard | March 28, 2008

The latest in an increasingly exhausting sweep of Italian imports about that country’s political tensions in the late Sixties and Seventies, Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother Is an Only Child is, for a little more than half of its running time, a serviceable middlebrow jaunt.

CJ7
By Brendon Bouzard | March 5, 2008

Stephen Chow was at least at one point the biggest star in Asia; he may still be. As an actor, he’s affable, equally conversant with extreme physical comedy and action melodrama. As a filmmaker, his approach is endearingly idiosyncratic.

Finding Forrester
By Brendon Bouzard | November 18, 2007

Apparently, the executives at Columbia Pictures liked Good Will Hunting so much that it commissioned its own version. What they got was Finding Forrester, a singular work in Gus Van Sant’s oeuvre.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
By Brendon Bouzard | October 28, 2007

Somewhat into Sidney Lumet’s remarkable Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead there’s an astonishing, wordless scene: Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a lumbering account executive for a real estate firm, slowly dismantles the interior of his Pottery Barn catalog condo.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars
By Brendon Bouzard | September 22, 2007

Upon second viewing, there arises an almost spiritual quality to these sequences, a raw essentializing of the human experience and basic animal necessity that approaches Daniel Defoe’s novel and inspiration.

Cría cuervos . . .
By Brendon Bouzard | September 1, 2007

It’s a film of intangible uniqueness, a gentle, almost comforting lyric on the amorality of childhood and the promises of a New Spain emerging from fascism.

Death at a Funeral
By Brendon Bouzard | August 14, 2007

For the sake of my faith in humanity, I’m going to refuse to accept that, and consider this an aberration, a relic of a bygone, less enlightened era. Moviegoers of America: please prove me right.

Bowling for Columbine
By Brendon Bouzard | July 11, 2007

Instead of a gunfight, the final duel is one of competing visual systems—the classical Hollywood hero and icon of conservativism taken down by a school photo signifying the brutality of an America plagued by gun violence.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit
By Brendon Bouzard | April 13, 2007

I owned Who Framed Roger Rabbit—we use this sort of discourse even now, though we usually acknowledge the essential facsimile nature of home video by throwing the words ‘a copy of’ in there.

Clean, Shaven
By Brendon Bouzard | November 9, 2006

Kerrigan’s work is unrepentantly unpleasant, a formal and thematic assault on institutional depictions of mental illness.

© Reverse Shot, 2025. All rights reserved Support for
this publication has been provided through the National Endowment for the Arts. Moving Image Source was developed with generous and visionary support from the Hazen Polsky Foundation, in memory of Joseph H. Hazen.