Shouldering a title that’s redundant twice over, John Gray’s Noo Yawker indie is a stubborn throwback to the Sundance-fueled, ethnic-neighborhood movie of the early-’90s, when every film-school grad with a fresh head full of Mean Streets decided he would be the next Scorsese. Here it’s “Brooklyn, 1975,” and one nice,…
In 2000, Mark Hogancamp, an upstate New York resident, was beaten outside a bar by four men so badly that he incurred a brain injury and woke up to a life he barely remembered. Seriously disabled mentally, he has existed since by mopping floors and making diner meatballs in his…
Airily disregarding the Hemingway “unadaptability principle,” this quaintly racy version of Papa’s most hated novel has a few bullets in its barrel: Dynasty scion Jack Huston, as the Hem avatar, is dull but physically a perfect fit, the Mediterranean tourist porn is addictive, and the story is thick with sex…
Anyone who remembers the 1977 Wes Craven film The Hills Have Eyes, which was and remains a piece of Milwaukee-beer shit, remembers it because (A) they had a memorable fuck-or-puke night at the aging neighborhood drive-in; (B) Michael Berryman’s uniquely hairless mug, which glared from the video store horror sections…
According to its publicity, bringing Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men to the screen again has always been “a cherished dream” of Executive Producer James Carville — suggesting a lurking sense of payback frustration with the insubstantial legacy of the real populist Southerner Carville himself helped to…
One of the weakest and most ridiculous aspects of popular culture is its narcissistic nowness. There’s often no then or later, and without past experience or the messy knowledge of life, modern entertainment media often seem poached in a neurotic teenaged brainpan, entranced with their own ignorant tunnel vision. A…
It would be a mighty sweet thing to see M. Night Shyamalan as the great redemptive storyteller he clearly thinks he is — or as he portrays himself in those American Express commercials. Genuine yarn-spinning, even as a doomed ambition, is virtually extinct in American movies; what had been the…
Our anemic movie industry recycles so relentlessly that even our complaints about such plasticized repackaging come off as recycled product of their own, offered primarily to draw the line between concerned aging cinephiles and the target consumers who don’t care a whit. But still, we’ve become a culture not merely…
We’ve all done it — killed an afternoon drinking in a pleasantly grungy roadhouse somewhere, boozily enjoying the illusion of having fallen off the grid, playing semi-forgotten blues songs on an outdated jukebox, and thinking aloud See, I should capture this feeling. This should be a movie. Sobered up, we…
Coming closer even than Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers to resembling the Chinese cover art for an Iron Butterfly album, Chen Kaige’s The Promise is psychedelia extremis. Hardly a minute of it passes without a concentrated dose of digital frou-frou and lavish, cartoon-poetic imagery: floating ocean goddesses, flying swordsmen,…
We’ve all done it — killed an afternoon drinking in a pleasantly grungy roadhouse somewhere, boozily enjoying the illusion of having fallen off the grid, playing semi-forgotten blues songs on an outdated jukebox, and thinking aloud See, I should capture this feeling. This should be a movie. Sobered up, we…
“You want an easy job, go join the Red Cross,” someone says well into Thank You for Smoking, a gleeful farce about capitalist mendacity based on Christopher Buckley’s 1994 bestseller. The implication, made drummingly plain in the film’s every bon mot, is that our ethical barometers skew lazily toward goodness,…
You may not yet have lost your ardor and respect for the pressure-point hammer blow that Quentin Tarantino executed on American movies, but it’s difficult at this late date not to view him as an imperative inoculation with unfortunate side effects: gas, bloating, dizziness, delusions of cleverness. Imitators flock when…
Given Inside Man’s bullpen (director Spike Lee, stars Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster), moment in political history, and advertising, you could be forgiven for anticipating some kind of socially relevant, perhaps even politically volatile dramatic smash-up — something with teeth, ambition, a functioning cerebrum, and a lusty relationship with reality…
Anyone who remembers the 1977 Wes Craven film The Hills Have Eyes, which was and remains a piece of Milwaukee-beer shit, remembers it because A) they had a memorable fuck-or-puke night at the aging neighborhood drive-in; B) Michael Berryman’s uniquely hairless mug, which glared from the video store horror sections…
Didn’t Richard Donner retire? A 1980s star-director name, among many, that should now send bolts of discouraging dread down your spine, Richard Donner may well be seeing his filmmaking skills peak with 16 Blocks — even if saying it’s his best, least flatulent, most efficient film is tantamount to saying…
