Take any minute or two of Lesley Manville’s performance in Another Year and strip it of all context. Even in total isolation, it would be immediately recognizable as a character from a Mike Leigh film. She exhibits a haggardness so … Continue reading All this, but no surprises for this year’s girl
This simple way to describe Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine is that its about both ends of a relationship: the beginning that’s full of promise and inspiration, and the ending that is like a crushing blow delivered over and over again. … Continue reading It’s the tattooed broken promise that I hide beneath my sleeve
The most important scene in the Coen brothers’ new adaptation of the Charles Portis novel True Grit occurs early on. Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross has journeyed to the Old West town where her father was shot and killed to retrieve the … Continue reading What separates me from you? What separates me from you now?
It’s no wonder that The King’s Speech moved to the top of Oscar prognosticators’ lists as soon as it’d been seen. It’s not that it’s good, although it is. It’s that it is packed, from its production company logos to … Continue reading Whatever it was he was about to say, everybody understood everything was gonna change
Some films approach greatness by bucking convention. They take a standard narrative apart and rebuild it with mischievous haphazardness, or heap in abstract, abrasive imagery like rubble out of a steam shovel basket. They upend expectations about identity, motivation and … Continue reading I’m in a head spin waiting for that bell to ring
Black Swan is a big, raging swarm of a movie. It’s either a horror film with art house pretensions or an art house movie enamored of the grandiose luridness that can be borrowed from the horror genre. It rains the … Continue reading She waves a magic wand and then she settles on me
Danny Boyle makes the worst movies that I kinda like. 127 Hours is drawn from the actual experience of Aron Ralston, an outdoors enthusiast who gained fame in 2003 when a solo excursion to Utah’s Bluejohn Canyon went awry, leaving … Continue reading When all the fires are fanned, when we’re shucking our plans, when we’re too weak to stand on our two feet
What do you you say about a twenty-six-year-old girl with a terminal illness? That she’s beautiful and brilliant? That she loves Liz Phair and Polaroids, video cameras and Jake Gyllenhaal? In Love and Other Drugs, Anne Hathaway plays Maggie Murdock, … Continue reading One day things will be much better but I don’t really want to write another verse
In 2008, a 16mm print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was found in Buenos Aires that was significantly longer than any other version that currently exists. When the silent film debuted in Germany in 1927, it ran around two-and-a-half hours. As … Continue reading You could sleep along the way, dream in black and white
Never Let Me Go is built upon some fairly commonplace themes. Unrequited love, the pains of growing up, the burden carried by the underclass all get an airing in the film. At times it feels very conventional, very plain. It … Continue reading Your footprints still they are in the sand, everything else washed away
Coffee for Two 