There Will Be Blood movie review: Citizen Plainview
There Will Be Blood slaps you in the face. It’s Joe Pesci in Goodfellas raging, “Do I amuse you? Do I entertain you?” in that way that suggests that it could not give two figs what you think of it.
historical
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.
3:10 to Yuma (review)
This is inventive and exciting, a grip-the-armrests, hold-your-breath reinvigorating of the Western movie…
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.
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (review)
Oh, thank the gods. Thank crazy Walt Disney’s head in a cryogenic freezer. Thank the army of producers and FX geeks and writers and cast and studio execs and focus-group gurus and everyone else who made this prepackaged, ready-for-synergy-marketing, lowest-common-denominator junk cinema the most cheesalicious, escape-a-riffic it could be.
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.
Zodiac movie review: killer movie
Fincher rivets us through what could have been an interminable two-hour-and-forty-minute runtime, by daringly jumping through a crime spree that spanned decades with brisk panache, boiling it down into slices of suspense, drama, and fear, with a bit of media criticism thrown in sideways for spice.
Miss Potter (review)
Zellweger brings a flinty steel to Potter, a woman with the faraway imagination of an overgrown child who simultaneously has the enormous backbone…
