Film noir has ascended from its murky origins in the dark past back in the 1940’s to high cinema fashion in our time, when any crime story of any kind earns the trendy term. Detective films, gangster movies, horror flicks, everything but romantic comedies, no matter their style or content, huddle under the great critical […]
George Grella
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“Belle”
In addition to the countless films made from original scripts, the medium’s long history demonstrates a close relationship with other arts. Hundreds of movies grow out of plays, short stories, novels, poems, even popular songs, but the origin of “Belle” may be unique —it began with a painting. The painting, an 18th-century portrait of two […]
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Film Review: “God’s Pocket”
The appearance of “God’s Pocket” suggests the ambiguity inherent in the preservative quality of art, possibly most apparent in the cinema. Something like a posthumous work, the movie stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, a strange, sad circumstance in which the man who died so recently, whose presence remains vivid in memory, of course looks familiar and […]
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Film Review: “Fading Gigolo”
Woody Allen’s presence in John Turturro’s new movie may represent something like an imprimatur, suggesting that his influence extends beyond the pictures he himself directs. Presumably filtered through Turturro’s imagination, “Fading Gigolo,” like it or not, seems very like one or another Woody Allen movie. The setting, the simple plot and situation, along with an […]
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Film Review: “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”
The new entry in the seemingly endless series of films emanating from the Marvel Comics factory demonstrates once again the level of maturity that the film industry expects from its target audience and also presumably the sort of content those audiences expect in today’s cinema. “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” — actually the second volume in […]
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“The Railway Man”
Wars never really end, and as Faulkner said, the past is not even past — almost 70 years after the Japanese surrender in World War II, the horror of the conflict and the behavior of the enemy toward their Allied prisoners continue to trouble the memories of the survivors. A number of histories, memoirs, and […]
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Film Review: Transcendence
Since the Industrial Revolution, a succession of mechanical innovations represents the ambiguous gifts of progress: the power looms of the early 19th century, the locomotive later in the same century, the automobile for most of the 20th century, and the computer in our own time. Beginning with “Colossus: The Forbin Project” back in 1970, a […]
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Film Review: “Draft Day”
As he has demonstrated in a number of movies, Kevin Costner is the best athlete in Hollywood. Unlike, say, Gary Cooper in “Pride of the Yankees,” Anthony Perkins in “Fear Strikes Out,” or Robert De Niro in “Bang the Drum Slowly,” Costner played a most credible brand of baseball in “Field of Dreams,” “For Love […]
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Film Review: “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”
As all students of the form know, World War II contributed enormously to the success of the comic books that flourished in the America of the past. Characters like Blackhawk and his international squadron, the Boy Commandos, and Wonder Woman often faced various threats from the Axis Powers; some critics have even suggested that Superman […]
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Film Review: “Noah”
Like the Biblical account of creation, with Adam and Eve consuming the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden or the construction and destruction of the Tower of Babel, the story of Noah reflects the Bible’s cyclical accounts of mankind’s overreaching and its consequent punishment. Darren Aronofsky’s new film, “Noah,” changes a good deal in […]
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Film Review: “The Grand Budapest Hotel”
Platformed carefully and hyped heavily, Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” should achieve an impressive box office success. For unclear reasons, his movies usually please the reviewers enormously — his first big production, “Rushmore,” benefited from three major stories in the New York Times on its release, then received the sort of adoration from critics […]
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Film Review: “Tim’s Vermeer”
Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer is
renowned for creating stunning, photorealistic paintings at a time when
photography didn’t yet exist, and without any documented formal training.
Directed by Teller — of illusionist/comedy duo Penn & Teller fame — the
engrossing new documentary, “Tim’s Vermeer,” follows the efforts by Texas
inventor and entrepreneur Tim Jenison to prove his theory that the artist
utilized optical devices to achieve the seemingly impossible.
Jenison makes for a charismatic
subject, and in his obsessive need to crack Vermeer’s method, he demonstrates
limitless ingenuity. Creating a device that adds mirrors to a traditional
camera obscura, the inventor sets out to perfectly
duplicate Vermeer’s 1662 painting, “The Music Lesson,” despite the fact that he
has never painted in his life. Jenison begins by hand-building a life-size
recreation of the room depicted in the painting, and things just get nuttier
from there. The results of his experiment are a fascinating examination of art,
technology, and what, if anything, separates the two. — Adam Lubitow
