Pages

▼
Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Border War

›
With The Last Stand (2013), director Kim Jee-woon makes a conditional success of a kind of film that defeated the Hong Kong directors in t...
1 comment:
Sunday, June 23, 2013

Aimless in New York

›
Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's Frances Ha (2013) is a portrait of post-college/pre-rest of your life anomie. Anyone who has drifted...
Sunday, June 16, 2013

Brittle Steel

›
A couple of years ago, DC Comics went through a big shake-up of their line of superhero comics. As happens when you have a universe shared ...
6 comments:
Sunday, June 09, 2013

Where Eleven Films Have Gone Before

›
It's entirely possible that there's an interesting movie lurking inside Star Trek Into Darkness (2013, directed by J. J. Abrams). ...
4 comments:
Friday, June 07, 2013

Notes from an Absentee Landlady

›
I haven't been blogging about film much lately. This is partially from blogging burnout. It's partially due to an extended period of...
Friday, May 31, 2013

Irons in the Fire

›
Iron Man 3 (2013, directed by Shane Black) is generally a smarter movie than any other superheroic part three I can think of. Other part ...
Wednesday, May 08, 2013

Wake the Dead

›
Most contemporary ghost stories are about haunted people rather than haunted places. This is the legacy of Henry James and Shirley Jackson,...
2 comments:
Tuesday, May 07, 2013

The Magic Goes Away

›
I don't normally write obituaries on my blog, but the news today of Ray Harryhausen's passing is something I can't let pass wi...
1 comment:
Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Pattern Recognition

›
There's a word for the psychological effect that causes people to see Jesus in a piece of toast. It's called "pareidolia"...
1 comment:
Friday, April 26, 2013

Love Among the Ruins

›
Like all movie fans, I have holes in my knowledge. There are plenty of classic or critically acclaimed films that for one reason or another...
Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Sins of the Fathers

›
If you pay attention to movies, you may have heard that The Place Beyond the Pines (2012, directed by Derek Cianfrance) has a killer openi...
2 comments:
Monday, April 22, 2013

Spam in a Cabin

›
I didn't go into Fede Alvarez's new version of Evil Dead (2013) expecting to hate it. Contrary to what you may think of people wh...
1 comment:
Saturday, April 20, 2013

Things Are Tough All Over

›
The last film on the schedule for last weekend's Italian Film Festival was Escort in Love ( Nessuno mi può giudicare , 2011, directed b...
2 comments:
Thursday, April 18, 2013

Exiles on the Flood

›
Shun Li and the Poet ( Io sono Li , 2011, directed by Andrea Segre) is set in Chioggia, a town near Venice, on the Venetian lagoon, but it...
Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Constant as the Northern Star

›
I had a weird bit of synchronicity happen to me on the way home from the theater after the first day of the Italian Film Festival. The seco...
Monday, April 15, 2013

Day In, Day Out

›
The traveling Italian Film Festival rolled into my fair city this weekend. Our version of the event consists of four films over one weeken...
Friday, April 12, 2013

Netflix Roulette: Firestarter Rekindled

›
Anyone who goes in for genre films has to have a streak of masochism. Genre movies are so rarely good that if you can't take the punis...
1 comment:
Monday, April 01, 2013

White Elephant Blogathon 2013: The Ice Pirates

›
I feel like I got off easy the first two years I did the White Elephant Blogathon. The way this works is that the participants throw a mov...
7 comments:
Sunday, March 24, 2013

Blogorama: Snowpocalypse Edition

›
We had another eight inches of snow dumped on us today, thus foiling my plans to see the new Park Chan-Wook film this afternoon. In the inte...
Thursday, March 21, 2013

A Road Not Taken

›
Somewhere in the middle of Gun Hill Road (2011, directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green), my viewing companion commented: "No way she surv...
3 comments:
Tuesday, March 12, 2013

The Curse of Netflix Roulette: Starship Troopers 3

›
A friend of mine asked me when I was going to do another Netflix Roulette post. He seemed disappointed when I told him that I was likely go...
Friday, March 08, 2013

True/False 2013 Day Four: The Only Band that Matters

›
There's always an awareness of politics in the selections at True/False. Non-fiction filmmakers are practically the only muckrakers le...
Thursday, March 07, 2013

True/False 2013, Day Four: Punch Drunk Love

›
I missed my chance to see Cutie and the Boxer on Saturday. It was a late show and I needed to get home to let my dogs out. I was also exha...
Wednesday, March 06, 2013

True/False 2013, Day Four: Promises

›
The films I saw on day four of True/False this year were mostly political in one degree or another. Of the five, only one could be said to ...
Tuesday, March 05, 2013

True/False 2013 Day 3: Standing in the Shadows

›
Day three of True/False was probably the most pleasant day of the festival for me. Part of this is because all of my screenings were at the...

True/False 2013, Day 3: Fish and Chips

›
When I was writing about last year's True/False, I mentioned that the films here tend to rhyme each other. Themes emerge from groupings...
Monday, March 04, 2013

True/False 2013, Day Two: Crashing and Burning

›
One of the difficulties anyone who writes about True/False has is the practice of "Secret Screenings." These are films that, for ...
Friday, March 01, 2013

True/False 2013, Day One: Traveler's Tales

›
The True/False film festival especially values films that question the very nature of truth and fiction. It's right there in the name o...
Wednesday, February 27, 2013

True/False 2013, Day Zero: Bring Up the Lights

›
I'm doing the True/False Film Festival again this year. This is the tenth year of True/False. I've attended all ten festivals in on...
Monday, February 25, 2013

Bitter Pills

›
If Steven Soderbergh's troubling new medical thriller, Side Effects (2013), is indeed his final feature film, then he's entering h...