Gangster Squad (review)
Gangster Squad! In color! This is blustery postwar mythologizing about the violent birth of the modern metropolis, all pulpy-bright even when it’s night…
based on fact
Heleno (review)
Avoids the game of the world’s first sports superstar to instead place a lurid focus on his other notorious public exploits…
A Royal Affair (review)
Socialism as cool and sexy and radical? Is this a fantasy realm? No, it’s 250 years ago.
Argo (London Film Festival review)
I was literally in tears for parts of Argo, a purely physical reaction, not an emotional one, to deal with the tension. The only other option would have been to moan out loud, the film is almost that unbearably nerve-wracking.
Hyde Park on Hudson (London Film Festival review)
Two separate tales of FDR that are certainly worthy of in-depth explorations on their own are mashed together in a way that is ridiculous and which gives both of them a short shift that neither deserves.
Hysteria (review)
Breezy, witty, gently naughty. Hello, steampunk orgasm!
Lawless (review)
An outsider’s look at a unique moment in American history, the gigantic failed social experiment of Prohibition: withering yet hugely engaging and ringing with unspoken critical parallels with today’s “war on drugs.”
Polisse (review)
It’s like the French version of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, except every case is one that would send Detective Elliot Stabler totally mental and inspire him to punch a wall or two.
Free Men (Les hommes libres) (review)
I kept hoping to get caught up in this untold story of the French Resistance in more than a coolly intellectual way, but that never happened.
Titanic 3D movie review: a human story
I had just begun my career as a film critic when Titanic was first released in late 1997. So I missed it, back then, what it was about James Cameron’s magnificent movie that was (and still is) so extraordinary.
