Promised Land (review)

At every turn, and via a simple narrative that is so effortless it barely feels constructed at all, nothing here is quite what it seems, and everything is even more than what it is.

Milk (review)

It opens with archival footage of police raids on gay bars, grainy black-and-white stuff that’s like a grim glimpse into a distant dreadful past, like the 1950s and 60s were another planet, and you think, Geez, people really worried *that much* about who was sleeping with whom?

5 reasons I’m psyched for ‘Milk’

All this week! 5 movies I’m psyched for in November — well, 3 movies I’m psyched for and 2 I’m not yet totally sure about but would like to be psyched for — and 5 reasons why. No. 1: Milk [opens limited November 26]. 1. Really? All those local anti-gay propositions passed all over the … more…

trailer break: ‘Milk’

Take a break from work: watch a movie trailer… Gus Van Sant’s biopic of San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, starring Sean Penn, just got its first trailer: (Or watch best-quality trailers in different sizes at Apple.) That is one fantastic trailer. It manages to be light and humorous and celebratory even though the story the … more…

King Kong (2005) (review)

Words like ‘meditation’ and ‘contemplation’ may seem inappropriate, at first glance, because the standard hack-movie-critic phrases like ‘roller-coaster ride’ followed by multiple exclamation points don’t even come close to doing justice to the heart-revving adrenaline rush Jackson has crafted. Two words: dino stampede. I probably should have put my head down between my knees and taken a series of long, deep breaths to recover from that early Skull Island setpiece, except it would have meant taking my eyes from the screen, and there was no way in hell I could have done that.

Far From Heaven (review)

With its lush Technicolor palette of autumn hues and lavish Elmer Bernstein score and slightly stylized acting and crisp costumes of crinoline and taffeta and gray flannel, Far from Heaven is a note-perfect pastiche of early studio melodramas.