Baz Luhrmann’s few movies can be described as anything from whimsical tweaks to wild, ecstatic fantasias, but rarely have they followed any sort of formula. When I say that Australia is a good old-fashioned Golden Age of Hollywood romantic epic, I mean it in the best sense. The wild setting of Australia’s Northern Territory, the […]
Maybe you heard about some protests, related to the use of the word “retard” in this movie. Maybe you didn’t, but you were concerned/intrigued at the idea of Robert Downey Jr. playing a black man. (Well, playing a white Australian actor playing a black man.) Maybe you think Hollywood just offends willy […]
Based on the autobiographical graphic novel of the same name by Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis chronicles how a little Iranian girl has come to live in France today. It’s as simple and as complex as that – and the animation follows suit. Almost entirely in black and white, Persepolis finds its visual complexity in […]
This is a side note having little to do with this actual movie’s specific merits. After all the small-fry good work this year and big studio misfires, this film feels like a relic of another era, in a good way. Having a big December period movie with powerhouses Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts […]
Rendition is the latest filmic attempt to draw attention to what’s already numbing us in the news. In this case, we have a citizen who is, um, renditioned on the way home to the US for a crime about which he is utterly ignorant, never mind culpable. Writer Kelley Sane seems to want […]
Two journalists in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004 started to notice some trends in the Iraqi response to American troop presence, trends they thought were not being fully explored by their press colleagues. Steve Connors and Molly Bingham proceeded to obtain unheard of access to private footage and on-the-ground action. They wove that […]
Director Pierra Rohov has the audacity to try and open a window into the mind of a suicide bomber with this documentary. The challenge with such a thesis is that the upside-down logic of such a mind is nearly unfathomable to those outside it. It goes against all our species’ inclinations and compulsions, and against […]
Letters from Iwo Jima is a film that is too long, yet has no time to fully plumb the depths of its fascinating topic. Beginning with a 2005 excavation of the famed 1944 battle site, Letters dares to explore the minds and hearts of our then-enemies while they were engaged in a losing battle against […]
Munich presented me with many difficulties in the theatre and for the many weeks afterward during which I was rendered incapable of writing any of my reviews. I suppose one could say that would define the movie as “striking,” but it did not feel like the Best Picture candidate it certainly wanted to be. […]
This movie has received some flak for not being a regular war movie, for not having a satisfying arc. That’s crap. How many more war movies do we need in the mold of the legion that have come before. Life does not have a satisfying arc, it has moments and experiences and […]
