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One Story To Rule Them All, One Story To Find Them, One Story To Bring Them...
Cloud Atlas Andy & Lana Wachowski, Tom Twyker Cloud Atlas Productions If any film deserves to be evaluated on its own merits, and not those of its source material, Cloud Atlas is that film. Anyone...
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An Unwieldy Journey: The Trouble with Looking Back
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Peter Jackson Warner Bros. There was a moment, just before The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey began, when I realized that I was genuinely excited to see what a film...
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Holy Somethin’: Carax’s Elegy for the End of “Mechanical” Film
Holy Motors Leos Carax Pierre Grise Productions Sometimes the year provides a resounding, if entirely unintended, recursion of symbols, themes, and archetypes. Watching Holy Motors, Leos Carax’s first...
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Oh Goody, A Writer Likes A Movie About Writing
Seven Psychopaths Martin McDonagh Alliance Films Whereas Kaufman’s Adaptation is a movie-about-movies that unravels as control over the script shifts from one screenwriter to another, writer/director...
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Histories Old, New, and Make-Believe
Zero Dark Thirty Kathryn Bigelow Alliance Films If I were to take my Google image search for this film at face value, I’d have to believe the great majority of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty...
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L’amour, toujours l’amour
Amour Michael Haneke Les Films du Losange In Iris Murdoch’s 1961 novel, A Severed Head, the protagonist twice invokes the notion of a physical intuition between lovers: “Our bodies, at least,” says...
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What Makes A Person Whole?
The Intouchables Olivier Nakache & Eric Toledano Gaumont What it means to be able-bodied is a subject that could fill hundreds of textbooks–and it does. As filmic negotiations of the question go,...
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The Relative Contentment of Late Middle Age
56 Up Michael Apted & Paul Almond ITV Studios It should come as little surprise that, at 56 years old apiece, the thirteen continuing participants in Michael Apted’s septennial documentary series...
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Familiarity as Filmic Virtue and Curse
Oblivion Joseph Kosinski Universal I came into this film having heard nothing but middling reviews: Great visuals! Predictable plot! Lousy script! And so forth. Consequently, my expectations were...
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Can We Pity the Dreamers While Despising Their Dreams?
The Great Gatsby Baz Luhrmann Warner Bros. All great national novels are about failure. They have to be: Any attempt to describe a nation-state’s ideals without incorporating the folly of its myriad,...
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The Little Movie That Thought It Could
The Purge James DeMonaco Universal Pictures You can tell a lot about a film just by figuring out its focus. When a film forwards a provocative premise–say, that a 2022 America has achieved stability...
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Do Green Ants Dream Electric Sheep, Or Something
Upstream Color Shane Carruth erbp Despite being proclaimed an elusive work, Shane Carruth’s second picture, Upstream Color, is not a difficult film to follow. You simply need to have been part of the...
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The Safest American Fairy Tale
World War Z Marc Forster Paramount Pictures There’s something a little depressing about the realization that, of the two apocalypse flicks released this summer, This Is The End is far and away the...
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Krypton’s Last Hope: American Jesus
Man of Steel Zach Snyder Warner Bros. I confess to chuckling when I first learned that Man of Steel was being marketed expressly towards Christian churches, with everything from early screenings to...
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Coherent Irresolution: A Hard Sell for Most Viewers, but not All
Only God Forgives Nicolas Winding Refn Radius-TWC One of my great amusements in watching UFC is the frequency with which triumphant fighters thank Jesus for helping them physically overwhelm their...
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Breathtaking, but Heavy: A Moral Tale at Zero-G
Gravity Alfonso Cuarón Warner Bros. In an age of mainstream films that often rely to excess on CGI for crowd-pleasing effect, it becomes unduly hard to call something a “visual treat”–but Gravity,...
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What Jackson’s The Hobbit Tells Us About Storytelling Today
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Peter Jackson Warner Bros. Last year, I made the mistake of re-reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit just before viewing Peter Jackson’s first instalment, and this...
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The Making-Twee of Violence and Nostalgia
The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson Indian Paintbrush / Fox Searchlight When the credits roll on The Grand Budapest Hotel, Stefan Zweig is named as the writer whose works inspired the 100 previous...
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The Godzilla Movie We Don’t Deserve (But I’m Glad We Have Anyway)
Godzilla Gareth Edwards Warner Bros. I confess, when I read certain negative reviews of Godzilla, I had a feeling I was going to love this film. And I do. When people complained that, while the fight...
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On Being Human: Johansson in a Tale of Ash and Mist
Under the Skin Jonathan Glazer Mongrel Media / Film4 & BFI Our fear of the unknown forms the emotional basis for many films, and our fear of the unknown in ourselves, even more. Rare is the film,...
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