Online Film Critics Society 2008 awards

The Online Film Critics Society, of which I am a member, has named its awards for 2008. The winners: PICTURE: Wall-E DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight ACTOR: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler ACTRESS: Michelle Williams, Wendy and Lucy SUPPORTING ACTOR: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Wall-E, Andrew … more…

awards contenders on DVD: the studio films

December can feel overwhelming, for movie watchers, with all the awards contenders flooding the arthouses — if you’re in New York and Los Angeles — and multiplexes this holiday season. But it’s always true, too, that films from earlier in the year manage to get notice from critics groups in the pre-Oscar-nominations territory… and some … more…

Ned Kelly (review)

The story of Australian cult figure Kelly — a 19th-century Robin Hood–esque outlaw, child of an underclass of Irish immigrants — is a tricky film, punctuated by bursts of staccato surrealism and bitter humor, hard to love unreservedly but easy to appreciate for its ambition. Heath Ledger (The Order) finds a wary, cautious groove as … more…

Mission: Impossible 2 and Shanghai Noon (review)

Can it be a coincidence that both of the big new flicks this Memorial Day weekend — the kickoff for Hollywood’s first summer movie season of the twenty-first century — are basically Hong Kong action movies? The people who think about these kinds of things — current-events journalists, mainly — have already predicted that if the 1900s were the American century, the 2000s may well be the Asian century… but they were speaking economically and politically. I guess it’s probably inevitable that Asia would start to hold some cultural sway in the West, too.