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Saturday, March 29, 2014

Ashes in the Wind

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It's a given that Hayao Miyazaki's new film, The Wind Rises (2013) is beautifully made. Studio Ghibli is synonymous with beautiful...
Friday, March 21, 2014

True/False 2014: Brought to Light

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One of the instructions given to screeners for True/False is to treat documentaries as "cinema." Does a given film play well as a...
Saturday, March 15, 2014

True/False 2014: But Is It Art?

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Every year, several of the films at True/False are designated as "secret screenings." These are often films that are contracted t...
Friday, March 07, 2014

True/False 2014: Merchants of Some Death

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I saw a confluence of films surrounding the problem of violence and culpability for violence this year. There are always a steady stream of...
Thursday, March 06, 2014

True/False 2014: Hindsight is 20/20

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Long careers in the arts--particularly in arts that are thought of as "entertainment"--are hard to string together, so when someo...
Wednesday, March 05, 2014

True/False 2014: The Higgs Boson Blues

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I don't know if it was by design--it probably wasn't--but one of the first line-ups of films at this year's True/False put Part...
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Tuesday, March 04, 2014

True/False 2014: Lizzy Borden Had An Ax

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There's an old Harlan Ellison story called "Hitler Painted Roses" that postulates a woman who burns in hell for a murder she ...
Friday, February 28, 2014

True/False 2014, Preliminaries: Acting Out

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The True/False has started in earnest, but I've still got a couple of films from the screening process to write about. As I was saying ...
Thursday, February 27, 2014

True/False 2014, Preliminaries: Every Cut is a Lie

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The night before True/False opened, they launched their companion series, showing with the festival, of "neither/nor" films. This...
Wednesday, February 26, 2014

True/False 2014, Preliminaries: Women and Men

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The True/False film festival returns to my fair city this week. I've been to every edition of True/False in some capacity. The last two...
Sunday, February 23, 2014

Talkin' Roots Music Blues

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I've been trying to write about the Coen Brothers' new film, Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) for weeks without success. The film is rec...
Saturday, February 22, 2014

Netflix Roulette: The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

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It's been a while since I gave the ol' Netflix Roulette Wheel a go. Spinning the wheel this weekend gave me The Extraordinary Adven...
Thursday, February 13, 2014

The Play's The Thing

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I don't have any deep insights into the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman beyond a vague distaste for the moralizing tone of some of its ...
Saturday, February 08, 2014

All Roads Lead To Rome

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"Late one night the club was heaving, I saw a vampire move across the floor. Old and white with a silver cane lusting for youth throu...
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Friday, January 31, 2014

Mulling Over 2013

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My ballot for the Muriel awards is due tomorrow and I have no freaking idea what's going to be on it. 2013 was one of those years that ...
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Thursday, January 30, 2014

Nothing Up My Sleeve...

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 Now You See Me (2013, directed by Louis Leterrier) is candy. It's a caper movie about magicians, which is a high concept that says ev...
Monday, January 27, 2014

Hearts of Ice

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Frozen (2013, directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee) finds Disney's animation unit making some sport of its own traditions. In doing...
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Saturday, January 25, 2014

More Human Than Human

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I don't know what I was expecting from Spike Jonze's Her (2013), but whatever preconceptions I may have had weren't even on t...
Wednesday, January 15, 2014

The Dragon's Lair

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In the taxonomy of movie monsters I keep in the back of my mind, the best dragons ever put on film are Vermithrax Pejorative from Dragonsl...
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Tuesday, January 07, 2014

The Good Arab

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The Attack (2012, directed by Ziad Doueiri) takes a difficult subject and crafts a noir thriller around it. In doing so, it runs rings aro...
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Friday, January 03, 2014

A Wolf in the Fold

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I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but I have a short list of filmmakers whose films I try to see at the first opportunity, often the ...
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Monday, December 30, 2013

Midwestern Gothic

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"Hell, I even thought I was dead 'til I found out it was just that I was in Nebraska."--Little Bill Daggett, Unforgiven I do...
Sunday, December 22, 2013

Innocence and Experience

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I'm not entirely sure how to process Blue is the Warmest Color (2013, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche), because it short-circuits a lo...
Monday, December 16, 2013

Where There's Smoke

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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013, directed by Francis Lawrence) is more or less the same film as its predecessor. The filmmakers behin...
Thursday, December 12, 2013

Dirty Laundry

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I saw a headline on one of the entertainment sites a few days ago that posed the question of whether or not Stephen Frears's new film, ...
Tuesday, December 10, 2013

The Big Quiz Redux

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This time of the year is kind of a slog for me, with most of my movie viewing confined to festival screeners (about which I can't write...
Wednesday, December 04, 2013

Dying in Dallas

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I've been dreading Dallas Buyers Club (2013, directed by Jean-Marc Vallee). I always dread films made by cisgender filmmakers in which...
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Saturday, November 30, 2013

Ragnarok and Roll

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Thor: The Dark World (2013, directed by Alan Taylor) is a better film than its predecessor. It may be a better film than The Avengers , bu...
Sunday, November 24, 2013

The Modern Prometheus

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The last film I watched this October was James Whale's Frankenstein, a film I've written about twice before. I don't have a lot...
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Friday, November 22, 2013

"Why, an Invisible Man Could Rule the World!"

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James Whale's adaptation of The Invisible Man (1933) is candy, pure and simple. Appropriate for Halloween, I think. It's the apoth...
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