Then Playing — Dumb Money; The Good Guys and the Bad Guys; Eileen
Short reviews of films by Craig Gillespie, Burt Kennedy, and William Oldroyd. Continue reading Then Playing — Dumb Money; The Good Guys and the Bad Guys; Eileen
Short reviews of films by Craig Gillespie, Burt Kennedy, and William Oldroyd. Continue reading Then Playing — Dumb Money; The Good Guys and the Bad Guys; Eileen
As Ryan Gosling blasts into theaters as Neil Armstrong, I’ll take advantage of this space to look back to when he was still venturing on occasion into a different kind of character role. I think this might still represent his … Continue reading From the Archive — Lars and the Real Girl
Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl is a small marvel of gracious, empathetic filmmaking. Centered on a lonely, withdrawn man who engages in a tender love affair with a life-size doll, the film is primed for harsh mockery. Instead, … Continue reading Now Playing — I, Tonya
Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975). Gene Hackman plays a seedy private detective named Harry Moseby who gets drawn into a case that involves tracking down a missing teenage girl, played by Melanie Griffith in one of her first real film roles. The film is entirely of its era, in good and bad ways. It’s nicely gritty and dark, but it also gets completely mired in a sense of existential dread until it become subsumed by its own fatalism. Nothing good can even come of this world, which the film labors to proves across its overly calculated third act. The film … Continue reading Ficarra and Requa, Friedkin, Gillespie, Penn, Rafelson
#44 — Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, 2007) Movies are routinely celebrated for making the impossible happen. This praise is usually reserved for spectacles of special effects that send superheroes slicing across the sky or warriors facing off … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Forty-Four