A film that finds a logical reason for the police to shoot a show host on live television, and makes the reason for shooting said host to be for the host’s own good, is a film that is not entirely devoid of interest. MONEY MONSTER is such a film, and this is a good thing, because… Read More »
HAIL, CAESAR!
If Douglas Sirk had directed a film noir written by Billy Wilder, it might have looked something like HAIL, CAESAR!, the latest thoughtful tangle of philosophy and whimsy from the Coen Brothers. Taking place in a 1951 Hollywood not entirely unlike the one that actually existed, it mixes Cold War paranoia, carefully managed studio PR… Read More »
BURN AFTER READING
It is a suitably perverse twist that the only person who has the clearest idea of what’s she is doing in the Coen Brothers latest offering, BURN AFTER READING, is Linda Litzke, the inadvertent femme fatale of the piece played by the miraculous Frances McDormand. Not the CIA operatives, not the Treasury Department guy, not… Read More »
MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS, THE
Two men, each determined to cross the border from Kuwait into Iraq for reasons they find compelling to themselves, wait with some impatience to get going. One is a man whose consciousness has been expanded beyond the quotidienne, and the other, a man whose consciousness has been contracted to the confines of his own psyche… Read More »
UP IN THE AIR
Click here to listen to the interview with director Jason Reitman (16:55)In UP IN THE AIR, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) has it all figured out. A business traveler with only 42 days at what he euphemistically calls home in Omaha, his is an uncomplicated life without the messiness that genuine human interaction entails. He glides… Read More »
UP IN THE AIR
Click here to listen to the interview with director Jason Reitman (16:55)In UP IN THE AIR, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) has it all figured out. A business traveler with only 42 days at what he euphemistically calls home in Omaha, his is an uncomplicated life without the messiness that genuine human interaction entails. He glides… Read More »
FANTASTIC MR. FOX
For years, Wes Anderson has created separate cinematic universes, different but oddly familiar, in which to tell his offbeat tales of family dynamics. In FANTASTIC MR. FOX, he has taken the next logical step and created an actual alternate reality. Using stop-motion animation, and a tale of excesses unbound by Roald Dahl, he has concocted… Read More »
THE AMERICAN
George Clooneys charisma and powerful screen presence have never been more integral to a film, nor used in a more futile effort, than in THE AMERICAN, a virtually silent opus that trades on Clooneys unassailable ability to seduce the camera. Based on Martin Booths novel, A Very Private Gentleman, it is less a action thriller… Read More »
THE IDES OF MARCH
THE IDES OF MARCH is a suitably Machiavellian portrait of how politics works. Not in the bastardized sense of ruthlessness for ruthlessness sake, but rather in the classical Machiavellian sense, ruthlessness to manage any given situation in order to achieve ones goals while making as little fuss with the population at large as possible. In… Read More »
SOLARIS
In a move as audacious as it is disastrous, Steve Soderbergh has decided to push the edges of what filmmaking can be and created in SOLARIS not so much a motion picture as a still life. One that is more sleep-inducing than a warm glass of milk and a bottle of Seconal. It is remarkable… Read More »