Reviews
Everything on Michael Mann's film and television resume predicts the exact Miami Vice that he made, which isn't to say that it's his masterpiece.
Vice and virtue may not be ideals that have survived quite intact into this century, and too much of how the critical community tends to think and talk about Borzage already highlights his distance, his antiquity.
The outsized critical gangbang which met the release of M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water bespeaks of a community of writers gripped by the worst form of pile-on groupthink imaginable.
Much to my great dismay, Richard Linklater’s heady, intelligent, beautifully empathic vision of a rather quotidian and familiar dystopia is in the running to be the least appreciated film of the summer.
The tedium of addiction, and of observing the addicted, may be accurately represented, but it’s hardly riveting cinema—the rare moments of insight are smothered by the freeform, meaningless yakking of brain-fried Bob and his substance-saturated buddies.
The less said about the plot the better, for History Is Made at Night unquestionably sinks or floats on the tremendous charm of its leads, and the pleasure that comes from watching them melt together.
The pleasure you take in Scoop depends entirely on how much slack you're willing to cut Woody Allen. Has the reservoir of goodwill, left empty after a half-decade drought, been replenished by Match Point?
Co-director Keith Fulton recently told indieWIRE that the greatest obstacle for Brothers of the Head was marketing it, which is a real knee-slapper.
Wisely, director/editor/cinematographer Matt Mahurin focuses much of his attention on the food in his laidback, downtown New York restaurant documentary I Like Killing Flies.
Though Cemetery Man is, on the whole, a very funny movie—and that’s all I usually ask—I have watched it to the point where most of its gags have worn dull, and I’m still not tired of it.
After this rampage, Allen John almost freezes to death, but for the grace of sexual healing—the film’s finale, at least in its truncated form, is Rosalee, draping herself over Allen John’s bare, ice-rimed chest to bring him to, a resurrection enacted through the pulse of flesh.
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.