Reviews
Stephens’s balls-out sex comedy may be scattershot, but as everyone by now must know, the see-what-sticks approach comes with the territory.
Maybe this hypothetical cinephile begins to get sweaty-palmed at the idea of these movies inhabiting a Hawksian zone of scaled-down performances against a loud genre background, buddy-buddy female characters, unforced back-and-forth interaction among members of a community....
Hathaway, and everyone who surrounds her (sorry, Adrian Grenier; blame the writing), is pretty much a snooze, and it’s left to Streep to pick up the slack, by channeling not Bette Davis but a Best of Everything-style Joan Crawford.
Captain Jack was the ultimate personification of the strange behavioral mannerisms, forceful charisma, and gender ambiguity that make Depp one of our most peculiar and tantalizing male stars.
A noirish late-period corker released through borderline-B Republic, the movie boasts at least a handful of extended passages featuring what we connoisseurs like to call shit-hot filmmaking.
Having acquired Assayas’s latest film not long after its star, Maggie Cheung, very justifiably won Best Actress at Cannes 2004 for her performance in it, Palm Pictures promptly did absolutely nothing with Clean for nearly two years.
With John Lasseter and Joe Ranft’s Cars, the ever-growing commercial imperatives required to feed the beast that is Pixar have overwhelmed any sense of responsibility towards their audience.
The chance of there ever being a true “director's cut” has been precisely nil since the director’s death in 1985, but Criterion has done as much as anyone could have possibly hoped in collating what's out there and presenting it in a hefty three-disc, one-novel set.
Shot for Fox during noir’s gestation period in 1941, I Wake Up Screaming starts with a silhouette-and-silky smoke backroom interrogation, then quickly abandons such squalid climes for settings more MGM than Warners.
Much has been said about the charm of Singer’s films, especially since he sacrificed the X-Men franchise by passing the buck along to Brett Ratner, whose X-Men: The Last Stand brought the triptych to a close with a resounding thud.
No, it’s not “relevant” at all—how could such a soul-killing journalistic-anemic word apply? Harlan County USA is primary and essential.
Respectable opinions hold that Jimmy Breslin’s 1971 mob farce The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight is a very funny book, and watching James Goldstone’s film of the novel from the following year, you can believe it.
I always find a bit dismaying those moments in globetrotting documentaries when it’s giddily revealed that, centuries of local culture notwithstanding, the kids in these far-flung locales actually just live for Top 40 hip-hop.