Shaun of the Dead movie review: necrophilia
I mean, who, precisely, said you couldn’t have a zombie romantic comedy? Why can’t the male lead express his undying devotion for his ladylove by bashing dead people in the head with a cricket bat?
London
Snatch (review)
Promising but a little unsteady on his feet with his first film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, writer/director Ritchie has graduated, with Snatch, to full-fledged cool-ass dude and filmmaker to watch out for.
Croupier movie review: zen and the art of dealing
The 1998 British film Croupier, only now getting a limited American release, was made well before the recent Reindeer Games, but comparing them is too delicious an opportunity to bash Hollywood to let pass by. Both have the same conceit of their cores: a Christmas Eve casino heist. In Hollywood’s eyes, this is a chance to show us Santas with machine guns running amuck, and not much else. In the hands of legendary British director Mike Hodges, who made the 1971 classic Get Carter, and equally legendary screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, who wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth, it becomes a spare, seductive, almost novelistic suspense drama in which the biggest crime is its protagonist’s misunderstanding of himself.
Yellow Submarine movie review: peace, man
Remember flower power? Remember when love and rock ‘n’ roll were gonna save the world? Me neither. So much has changed in the 32 years since Yellow Submarine was released…
A Christmas Carol (Patrick Stewart) and A Christmas Carol (aka Scrooge) (Alistair Sim) (review)
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Patrick Stewart do his one-man reading/performance of A Christmas Carol several times. Nothing beats the impact of live theater, and so for years now Stewart has personified Ebenezer Scrooge for me. I was delighted to learn that Stewart would be playing Scrooge in a full-blown production of Charles Dickens’s classic novel — playing all this month on the cable network TNT — and fully expected that it would become a favorite Christmas movie of mine. And it has.
Sliding Doors movie review: doors open, doors close
How would my life be different if only I’d taken the road not taken? This fun little movie favors an inevitability, a brand of destiny about who we meet and what we do…
Shakespeare in Love movie review (again): love, and a bit with a dog
‘Love and a bit with a dog,’ that’s all audiences want, according to Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush), owner of London’s Rose Theater. A bit of romance, a bit of comedy — isn’t that really all that movie audiences, too, are after? Shakespeare in Love has both in spades, and it’s the first film of its kind to win Best Picture since 1977’s Annie Hall.
A Man for All Seasons (review)
A Man for All Seasons is a handsome production. In other words, it is staid, stern, plodding, and precise, with about as much passion as your 11th-grade history textbook.
My Fair Lady (review)
My Fair Lady — another musical from Gigi creators Lerner and Loewe — is a charming and amusing satire on the absurdity of rigid class distinctions such as were to be found in turn-of-the-century London.
Shakespeare in Love movie review: fan fiction
Tom Stoppard, I’ll grant you, is infinitely more clever and more talented than your run-of-the-mill fan-fiction writer. But he’s doing exactly the same thing as those hordes of writers who have continued and expanded upon the adventures of the crew of the Enterprise, the owner of the TARDIS, those two FBI agents down in the basement, and the fictional denizens of a zillion other cultish TV shows.
