Photo by Pewee Flomoku
Africa doesn’t make the news in the United States very often. Even countries like Liberia that are uniquely linked to our own history rarely make headlines. As a result, you’ve probably never heard of the courageous women who came between a group of warlords and a corrupt president in 2003 to bring [...]
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Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michelle Williams and Tom Noonan in Synecdoche, New York
One of the great pleasures of going to the movies is watching an artist set caution aside to make something big and powerful and true. Whether or not they completely succeed is sometimes beside the point. In the case of Synecdoche, New York, Oscar-winning [...]
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Though one of its central characters turns out to be a vampire, Sweden’s Let the Right One In is not quite a horror film. Working from the best selling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, director Tomas Alfredson is more interested in the story’s central relationship between a troubled 12-year-old boy and the strange girl who [...]
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Boo!
From France, Fear(s) of the Dark is a nightmarishly entertaining collection of short films on a theme of fear animated in beautiful black and white by six renowned graphic artists including Blutch, Charles Burns, Pierre de Sciullo, Marie Caillou, Lorenzo Mattotti and Richard McGuire. Like many such omnibus efforts, some of the segments are better than [...]
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Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Banks in W.
Somehow, Oliver Stone’s W. manages to live up to my best hopes and fall victim to my worst fears all at once. When Stone first announced he was planning a film about our sitting president, his intentions for it were unclear. Being too late for effective satire yet too [...]
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Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married
Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married is a raw, edgy examination of the unique power of families to tear apart as well as to heal. It begins with Kym Buchman (a chain-smoking Anne Hathaway) getting out of rehab for the weekend to attend the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). [...]
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On November 18, 2003, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled 4-3 in the case of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that restricting marriage to heterosexual couples was contrary to the Massachusetts constitution. Massachusetts therefore became the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriages. Opponents of the ruling immediately began the process of amending [...]
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Writer/director Lance Hammer’s debut feature Ballast is one of those loosely plotted films that reveal themselves slowly and almost obliquely. Who the characters are and how they’re related comes across subtly and the story seems to manifest itself almost out of nothing. As such, it would be robbing the film of some of its pleasure [...]
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Popular comedies are a tricky business. If they’re too quirky, they’re liable to limit themselves to a niche audience. Smooth off too many rough edges however, and they risk turning to cinematic sponge cake — formless, lifeless and lacking in character.
Occasionally a comedy will hit a sweet spot where it satisfies expectations yet remains edgy [...]
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Co-written and directed by Ed Harris from a novel by Robert B. Parker and starring Harris and Viggo Mortensen, Appaloosa is almost a throwback to the old B-westerns. It’s not a cheap film or one of low production quality, but it’s a simple, almost intimate story rather than one with the epic or mythic pretentiousness [...]
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Feihong Yu and Henry O in Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
(photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)
On the surface, director Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a simple story about an elderly father who comes from China to America to help his adult daughter through a divorce. Underneath, it’s a bit [...]
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John Malkovich dictates his ‘memwahs’ in Burn After Reading
They are two brothers who have a knack for combining genres and styles into hybrids that can only be described by using their last name as an adjective. Their films are set in a recognizable approximation of reality, but certain elements have been tweaked and exaggerated. Unexpected [...]
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Summer Bishil and Aaron Eckhart in Towelhead
My hatred of Towelhead set in early and I never shook it. I think it was the scene at the airport where Maria Bello’s Bad Mother character is shipping poor confused daughter Jasira (Summer Bishil) off to live with her Lebanese father in Houston after the Creepy Live-In Boyfriend [...]
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Brian Cox in Red
Brian Cox (Rushmore, Zodiac) is Avery Ludlow, a quiet, sensible man living alone with his old dog Red in a big, out of the way house in rural Oregon. The film begins more than a decade after the tragic loss of his wife and son and Avery has mostly put his life [...]
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Penélope Cruz in Elegy
Based on Philip Roth’s novel The Dying Animal, Isabel Coixet’s romantic drama Elegy stars Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh, a college literature professor who spent the sexual revolution of the ’60s married. Eventually abandoning his wife and son, he spent the ensuing years making up for lost time, jumping from one woman [...]
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