You and I both know the truth. You just don't admit it.
Highly influential, passionately inspired, and awfully long-winded, Quentin Tarantino has amassed a filmography that is soaked in self-indulgence. He’s made some great movies regardless, but I find myself now exhausted by his work, even if at times I’m thrilled and engaged. The experience of watching a Tarantino movie tends to be a scattered one, pieces…
From the page to the stage to the screen, it’s been quite the journey for Les Misérables. Once Victor Hugo’s novel, then Cameron Mackintosh’s stage musical, and now Tom Hooper’s movie, the beloved tale of lives in the gutters of 19th century France hits the big screen in musical form looking, well, almost identical to…
There’s a unique sprinkling of cinematic magic that touches the infamous shower scene in “Psycho” so memorably and effectively that watching the scene, dissecting the scene, experiencing the scene is great fun from any angle. So with this automatic reaction hardwired to my senses, I very much enjoyed seeing the scene recreated with moderate gusto…
It seems strange to criticize a movie for its beauty, especially considering the chief architect of that beauty is a filmmaker as visually and poetically gifted as Ang Lee, but beauty is exactly what fells the beast in Lee’s glossy Life of Pi. Adapted rather faithfully from Yann Martel’s celebrated 2001 novel of the same…
Fittingly, the minuscule indie drama The Sessions, a bitsy biopic about the sexual awakening of iron lung inhabitant Mark O’Brien, is a movie of give and take. The actors give the most, while writer/director Ben Lewin, adapting the story from an article O’Brien wrote, mostly takes. It’s a bit of a dysfunctional relationship in some…
Like the character at their latest movie’s core, Denzel Washington and Robert Zemeckis are veterans of their respective occupations. They’re pros that know how to operate the big machinery of their creative positions and their experience affords them a comfortable confidence to get the job done safely. This level of skill is important to note…
Longing loneliness and rich romanticism collide in Tabu, each more a feeling than an idea, each dominating a portion of Miguel Gomes’ emotionally oppositional drama. Split nearly down the middle, the movie opens with a prologue and then devotes half of the following picture to part one (titled “Paradise Lost”) and the other half to…
