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Review Avalanche
Between the NYFF and my regular slate of screenings, I’ve been a busy reviewer as of late. This week, I’ve got three new Slant magazine reviews, two for films coming out this Friday – the mediocre Friday Night Lights and the terrible Taxi – as well as a review of Ken Burns’ latest, Unforgivable Blackness:…
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A Big Red Classic
Samuel Fuller’s last great achievement – 1980’s WWII epic The Big Red One – is a humorous, gut-wrenching and poignant (though never sentimental) portrait of soldiers on the front lines. Recently restored with 40 minutes of never-before-seen footage, the newly-expanded film makes its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival later this week. I…
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New Season, New Criticism
It’s officially Fall (or Autumn, if you like), and I’ve got three new reviews to kick off this, the best season of the year. Two are for moronic mainstream misfires, one is for a jazzy documentary appearing at this year’s New York Film Festival. All currently appear in Slant magazine. The Forgotten (Slant magazine) Miles…
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Two for Now, One for Later
Here are two new reviews of films coming out this weekend – Walter Salles’ respectable The Motorcycle Diaries and John Waters’ hilariously vulgar A Dirty Shame – and one for David Gordon Green’s Undertow, which comes out in late October but will first be screened at this year’s New York Film Festival. The Motorcycle Diaries…
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Zombies, Quantum Physics, Cell Phones, and More Zombies
Four new published reviews for this sunny September morning: Shaun of the Dead (filmcritic.com) What the Bleep Do We Know? (Slant magazine) Cellular (Slant magazine) Resident Evil: Apocalypse (Slant magazine) And to top things off, I’ve got new reviews of John Waters’ Cecil B. Demented and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers posted below.
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Abercrombie Park
Josh Hartnett and Diane Kruger may be clothing catalog-cute, but their new movie Wicker Park is just another ugly Hollywood adaptation of a superior foreign film (in this case, Gilles Mimouni’s L’Appartement). I slander this Single White Female-meets-Vertigo silliness at Slant magazine: Wicker Park P.S. I’ve also got new reviews of AVP and Hero below.
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Constructing Past and Present
Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair, an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s acclaimed novel, adds a dose of modern “you go girl” feminism” – as well as some Indian flavor – to the nineteenth-century British proceedings. Christoffer Boe’s Reconstruction, winner of the Camera d’Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, is a semi-pretentious rumination about love, fate,…
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Bloody Hell
Rampant killing is a prominent feature of two upcoming releases, but only one will get your blood pumping. Bang Rajan, an acclaimed hit from Thailand about a famous 18-century battle between the Siamese and Burmese, is a stirring, violent epic about national pride and personal sacrifice. Suspect Zero, on the other hand, is a dunderheaded…
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28 and counting
My birthday was this past Friday and, besides celebrating with friends, I spent part of the day writing two new reviews for Slant magazine. My critiques of the awful Exorcist: The Beginning and the unremarkable I Am David (a family film which comes out in late October) are now available for your Monday morning reading…
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Good, Bad and Brown
While I still haven’t seen AVP yet (sorry Wawa!), I have caught a few films in the last week. Below, you’ll find DVD write-ups for The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra and Fifty First Dates, as well as reviews of the new theatrical films Napoleon Dynamite and The Manchurian Candidate. But if that’s not enough, I’ve…
