So this is what Jewish fatalism looks like stretched out to feature length. The new film from Ethan and Joel Coen, A Serious Man, focuses on a college professor at the dawn of the nineteen-seventies, facing a tenure hearing and … Continue reading Here it comes, here it comes, here comes the serious bit
If Ricky Gervais had only created The Office, he would deserve a place on the upper tier of comic creators, just as John Cleese would merit veneration if he had only signed his name to Fawlty Towers. As Gervais moves … Continue reading I’m tired of the stories that you always tell, Shakespeare couldn’t tell a story that well
Making a film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s revered children’s book Where the Wild Things Are seems like the height of doomed folly. As has been noted often in the long run-up to the film’s release, this is a book that … Continue reading I think you move me
There is perhaps nothing more endearing about Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, the roller derby film Whip It, than its delighted conviction in the value of sisterhood. More specifically, it is Barrymore’s complete immersion in the concept without any hint whatsoever … Continue reading Shape it up, get straight, go forward, move ahead
Zombieland has everything you expect from a movie called Zombieland. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but one constructed with a certain sense of humor, a sly awareness of the inherent ridiculousness of its colorfully devastated landscape. And of … Continue reading All you sittin’ in high places, the pieces gonna fall on you
It is perhaps fitting that Jane Campion has made her finest film since The Piano by turning to a poet. Much of what makes the film that won her a best screenplay Oscar and only the second woman in Academy … Continue reading Take me to the dance and hold me tight
I think it’s possible that Steven Soderbergh will never make another great movie. I don’t mean to imply that his efforts won’t be significantly better than most of what crosses multiplex screens, or that he won’t continue to be one … Continue reading I intentionally wrote it out to be an illegible mess
At it’s best, science fiction is all about ideas. Shrewd philosophical debates and trenchant social commentary are housed within fantastical tales of space travel and futurescapes. That’s harder to discern from the offerings in the multiplex, where the default approach … Continue reading I am a visitor here…I am not permanent
(500) Days of Summer seems to aspire to nothing less than reinventing the typical romantic comedy. It doesn’t subvert the form or offer some sort of deconstruction. Instead, it seems to want to take something familiar and dose it with … Continue reading Summer, summer, summer, it’s like a merry-go-round
There’s a moment in Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie, The Hurt Locker, which is predictably tragic and tragically predictable. A military man who’s stationed in Iraq, but largely unversed on the dangers that exist on those sun-scorched streets, tags along on … Continue reading When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone
Coffee for Two 