Noah Baumbach has certainly been going to some dark places with his most recent efforts, at least his most recent directorial efforts. He’s also been collaborating with Wes Anderson, co-writing the screenplays on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and … Continue reading Let’s get together and talk about the modern age
By now it should come as no surprise to anyone that’s paid even cursory attention to these digital dispatches that I like the way Martin Scorsese makes movies. I concede this in advance not to cast doubt upon my opinion … Continue reading I’m on an island and I’ve got nowhere to swim
Oh, it’s a howler. Like a lot of members of a couple, the Hallmark holiday that occurred this past weekend was an excuse to venture into a movie theater. While there were potential horrors aplenty waiting to be strung up … Continue reading Got a curse we cannot lift, shines when the sunset shifts
It’s hard to deny the emotional wallop built right in to Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. Set in 1987, the film tells the story of an overweight black teenager living in poverty with her abusive mother in … Continue reading Now Howard the Duck and Mr. Stress both stayed trapped in a world that they never made
It’s hard to see Nine as anything other than a retreat of sorts for director Rob Marshall. He followed up his Oscar-feted Chicago–a film you may recall that I quite like–with an attempt to branch out into prestige fare that … Continue reading On the black Fellini sails, tattered rags that hangs on nails reminds me
There have already been plenty of words devoted to all the ways in which Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air is especially timely, so let’s instead consider the elements that make it timeless. Yes, the profession of the film’s main … Continue reading Trying to fly away might have been your first mistake
Since at least 1989’s The Abyss, James Cameron has expanded the technical limits of cinema with each successive film. He’s gone to special effects artisans with a reasonable assessment of their capabilities and explained, probably with some degree of forcefulness, … Continue reading So break a leg now, soon all the world will be a stage
The Road seems like it should work. Cormac McCarthy’s novel is a riveting depiction of life after society has broken down completely, following a bedraggled father and son as they achingly march towards the coast and the indeterminate promise that … Continue reading This dead road leads down to that dead road and back
Around the time that The Darjeeling Limited was released, a good friend of mine, who knows a thing or two about movies himself, asked me if I was going to go see the “new dollhouse” from Wes Anderson. That struck … Continue reading Take a run and hide yourself away
It is not a love story. Well, in a way it is, and it certainly has all of the trappings of one. An Education follows a schoolgirl named Jenny in nineteen-sixties London who encounters a charming older man, and begins … Continue reading Do you see her face when she’s gone, sometimes so bright your heart just stops
Coffee for Two 