Shutter Island (review)
If what I think is happening here, is happening here, it better not be…
film noir
The Spirit (review)
Bête Noir It’s been a week since I saw The Spirit and I’m still thinking about it, and usually that’s a good thing, when a movie sticks with you like that, but not always. Like, not this time. Cuz what I’ve been turning over in my head is this conundrum: Just how awful is this … more…
M Squad: The Complete Series (review)
I kept expecting to hear, with every episode of *M Squad* I watched, the voiceover guy saying, “*M Squad*! In Color!” over the opening credits.
Max Payne (review)
I think I’m entirely justified in saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute…!’
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.
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.
The Ice Harvest movie review
John Cusack as a neo-noir antihero? Hell yes: he’s been building to this his whole career. And now he’s done it, yanked the rug out from under us and left us to wonder just how far over he’s gone.
A History of Violence and Derailed (review)
I knew nothing about *A History of Violence* before I sat down to watch it, absolutely nothing except that it starred Viggo Mortensen, and that that was enough to make me want to see it. I had even managed to avoid hearing that this was a David Cronenberg film, knowledge that certainly would have colored my expectations about it, as would have the knowledge, which I did not have until just before the movie began, that this was based on a graphic novel.
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (review)
It’s something close to a stroke of genius that once-wunderkind screenwriter Shane Black sought out Robert Downey Jr. to star in his directorial debut. Not because Downey is so achingly sublime an actor and so funkily charismatic a screen presence that it near to makes you want to weep with despair at what brilliance we’ve missed from him over the years during which he wasn’t able to keep his shit together — though he certainly does give us one of the most deliciously shivery-great performances so far this year in *Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.*
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (review)
It’s probably very much funnier if you’re already a bit of an Anglophile, if you drink a lot of tea and long to attend a weekend house party in the 1930s at a manor in Sussex where you take the train down from London and someone meets you at a station that’s called a ‘halt’ and you don’t think murder is all that bad as long as the mystery of it is solved by a gentleman who has his manservant dress him for dinner. Cuz the Wallace & Gromit claymation toons have always been very much about both celebrating and sending up the peculiar British character, and you have to recognize it as a bit silly and a bit of an exaggeration that was never really real anyway but still completely love and embrace it nevertheless to really get the warmth and affection with which they — the Wallace & Gromit toons, that is — are offered for your entertainment.
