EMPIRE is a nitty, gritty look at life on the mean streets of the wrong part of New York. Its message, crime doesn’t pay, isn’t a new one, but any film that proffers a moral compass is one worth paying attention to. Also worth paying attention to is co-producer John Leguizamo’s performance as Victor Rosa,… Read More »
Search Results for: Whose streets
EASY MONEY (SNABBA CASH)
EASY MONEY is an ironic title for a sharply observed, tonally complex story of people who dont fall into easily definable categories. Money is the driving force in all their lives, but they are not all people who have sold their souls for it. There is nothing so cliché in this Swedish import starring Joel… Read More »
THE ANGELS’ SHARE
Filmmaker Ken Loach is not someone from whom a comedy is expected. Known for his uncompromising stories of social injustice told with trademark searing intensity, humor would seem to be a format with which he is, if not unfamiliar, at least uncomfortable. This is what makes THE ANGELS SHARE all the more remarkable. The usual… Read More »
CLOSED CIRCUIT
CLOSED CIRCUIT is a big, goofy simulacrum of a political thriller. There are all the key scenes. There are the requisite sotto voiced pronouncements with an eyebrow arched, well, archly. There are people running for their lives through dark streets at ungodly hours. There are double-, triple-, and quite possibly a quadruple-cross. And why that… Read More »
28 DAYS LATER
At one point in 28 DAYS LATER, a character makes the salient point that from a geological viewpoint, the reign of human beings on planet Earth is barely a blip on the radar of existence. Humans might, indeed, be thought of as an anomaly and their disappearance could be construed as a return to normalcy.… Read More »
FAHRENHEIT 9/11
It has been said that Harriet Beecher Stowe helped start the Civil War with her novel, Uncle Toms Cabin, which enumerated the evils of slavery in shocking detail to a nation that had all but turned a blind eye to what was known as the peculiar institution. It may just be the idealist in my… Read More »
SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
The most amazing thing about SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW is that the art direction isn’t the end of the story. Using sets created digitally and added to footage of actors emoting in front of a blue screen, writer/director Kerry Conran has fashioned an eye-popping roller coaster of a film that is a… Read More »
INSIDE DEEP THROAT
Filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have taken a hot button topic and turned it into a piquant and incisive sociological treatise on the societal attitudes towards sex and sexuality and how those attitudes, oddly, havent changed much even with the sexual revolution. That it’s also a look at the eternal struggle between art and… Read More »
MADAGASCAR
As I was watching MADAGASCAR, the new animated flick from Dreamworks, it occurred to me that there just aren’t enough lemurs in films of any kind and that’s a darn shame. Not just because as primates they’re our cousins, distantly, but also because there is something intrinsically and compellingly absurd in their large eyes and… Read More »
GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’
I can see why this seemed like such a good idea. Jim Sheridan, a director who has made brilliant films about the strife and violence in Northern Ireland and has done so without becoming maudlin, put at the helm of a film that deals with the gangsta culture of violence in contemporary New York. The… Read More »