Most published critics are idiots. Yet again this verity was reinforced to me whilst popping in and watching one of the latest films by Woody Allen to hit DVD. Cassandra’s Dream was almost wholly ignored in this country, lasting only a couple of weeks in the theaters. Yet, it is one of the two best…
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the current Big Three film giants of Europe, in that he is a throwback to the days of visionary directors like Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Andrei Tarkovskiy. Along with Greece’s Theo Angelopoulos and Hungary’s Bela Tarr, Ceylan has grown into a rarefied…
If you could see me as I’m writing this review for Cop Out you’d see that I’m laughing my ass off. Not because the latest incompatible cop buddy movie which pairs Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan together is funny — oh no my friend — I’m laughing because this film is so far from funny…
The scene: Ogden Marsh, a peaceful Midwestern town of ~1,000 where everyone knows everyone and it is safe to keep the doors unlocked and windows open at night. Certainly not the place one would ever imagine a neighbor ruthlessly killing another. And that is what makes The Crazies all the more creepy. When a plane…
Sometimes a work of art is not even that artistic, it’s just merely interesting. Interesting enough, however, to be recommended, if not because it has depth but because it simply offers a bit more insight into other works of art by an artist. Such is the case with the 90 minute long 2003 documentary by…
The opening shot of a Boston ferry emerging from an impenetrable veil of fog as it makes it way toward a hostile, gothic-looking island proves to be an apt visual metaphor for what transpires in Shutter Island. From the moment the ferry appears and we hear the first strains of music, the audience is cued…
The 1970s were more than just about polyester bell bottom pants, experimentation with mind altering drugs or unprotected group sex (or was that the 60s?). Whatever the case, I’m quite sure it was the time of the blaxsploitation film. Stereotypical black characters (pimps, pushers, thugs, etc.) in stereotypical locations (ghetto and/or other urban environment) abound….
