No Country for Old Men (review)
Here’s the thing about Joel and Ethan Coen: they can make anything, absolutely anything, intensely profound and deeply weird — and weirdly deep — and cruelly magnificent all at the same time.
drama
Gone Baby Gone (review)
It’s no rare thing that a film gets buzz for its director. It’s a rare thing when that director has never made a film before. It’s an even rarer thing when the film by that first-timer turns out to be as astonishingly confident and shrewd as actor-turned-director Ben Affleck’s *Gone Baby Gone.*
Michael Clayton (review)
You sell out and you sell out and you sell out until you can’t do it anymore. And that’s when things gets interesting.
Eastern Promises movie review: viva Viggo
Movies about gangsters: You expect a lot of noise. Shouting and screaming. Barrages of gunfire. Not here. Here we have somber reflection, the lurking gray peril of an urban underbelly, shifting shifty glances and unspoken threats. ‘Eastern Promises’ is almost silent — even its title sounds like a shush.
Death at a Funeral movie review: die laughing
This is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, and that’s not something I say lightly. It’s practically Shakespearean in its exquisite foolishness and comedic intrigue.
Becoming Jane (review)
I love *Becoming Jane* even if it is almost entirely invented, because it captures both the aching romanticism and the cold, hard practicalities of Austen’s fiction.
Talk to Me (review)
Oh my god and wonder of wonders, here we have a studio movie — a drama! — starring not one but two actors-of-color. God, what a terrible phrase. Don’t we all have a color? Okay: two actors who aren’t the usual medium peachy-beige of those who typically get to star in studio movies unless their name is Denzel Washington.
Tribeca ’07: The Cake Eaters (review)
You asked me to marry you, and then you took off without saying good-bye. Three men, three women, and a whole lotta tender secrets, aching desire, and broken hearts fill up the directorial debut of actor Mary Stuart Masterson — so much so that what seems at first like a lean, spare psychic space in … more…
The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) movie review: before the Wall fell
The ending can make or break a film. The Lives of Others, Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, has one of the greatest final lines of dialogue that I’ve ever heard in a movie.
300 (review)
The first person who uses any aspect of this flick to justify the American debacle in Iraq is getting a swat across the nose with a copy of *My Pet Goat.* Which King Leonides of Sparta does not sit reading while his country is threatened and attacked.
