Following a long and often instructive tradition, The Recruit demonstrates that popular film in general — and the thriller, in particular — provide an index to the characteristic tensions and attitudes of a particular time and place. Last year’s retrograde and essentially obsolete thriller, The Bourne Identity, presented a familiar vision inherited from decades of […]
Movie Reviews
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Florida: It’s not just for voter fraud anymore
It’s not difficult to pinpoint the exact instant I stopped enjoying the fifth annual Sarasota Film Festival. The moment occurred when, kicking and screaming, I was forced onto the flight that returned me to Rochester and its subzero temperatures. Piles of sand turned to mounds of snow. Palm trees became ice-encrusted bushes. Scores and scores […]
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Personal loquacity
Some filmmakers apparently forget the elementary and obvious fact that their medium originated in nonverbal narratives and flourished in silence long before the introduction of spoken dialogue (which many critics and historians initially regarded as a retrogressive, rather than a progressive, step), and, therefore, film should always rely on its visual possibilities. Whatever its merits, […]
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Life’s a drag, then you die of poison cocoa
Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing focuses mainly on the Bassett family, who live and/or work in Southeast London. Well, maybe “live” isn’t the right verb — “exist” might be more appropriate. They seem to have a nice, normal family life, but are far too miserable to appreciate it. Phil (Timothy Spall) is the father, […]
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A voyage through Italian cinema
Ah, there’s where I left my sense of decency: A scene from ‘Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom.’ The administrators of the film program entitled “Your Voyage to Italy” — at the George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre this month and next — could scarcely have chosen two more distinctive works to initiate the series. […]
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The lies of the Godfather of reality
There are more than a handful of high-profile films in theaters right now, and they’re all vying for both Oscar attention and your hard-earned money. Two of them happen to be the directorial debut of even higher-profile, larger-than-life movie stars, and, coincidentally, both focus on real people and actual events. But that’s where the similarities […]
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Don’t be afraid of Virginia Woolf
In Virginia Woolf’s first book, The Voyage Out, a character expresses the desire to write a novel about all the things that people don’t say, an ambition that the author herself fulfilled in a later book entitled The Waves. Steadfastly devoted to that interior life and those unspoken thoughts and feelings, inclined to close observation […]
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The rebirth of cool
On the surface, Narc sounds like the kind of flick that should be going straight to either video or cable. I had never heard of the director (Joe Carnahan), and the two leads (Jason Patric and Ray Liotta) are hardly the stuff of dreams. So what am I missing here? Why the hell is this […]
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An extraordinary, ordinary man
The opening sequences of his last two movies provide some proof that Jack Nicholson’s much discussed new maturity is not simply one of those inventions of the publicity folks and their accomplices in the entertainment media. Both The Pledge and About Schmidt introduce Nicholson’s character at a retirement party, thus indicating that unlike many Hollywood […]
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The loneliest piano player in the world
The Pianist is the first film director Roman Polanski has made in Poland since his very first feature. It’s also, according to the press notes, the film he’s waited his entire career to make. It’s too bad he waited so long, because if Polanski had made The Pianist a little earlier into his career, it […]
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Making nice with the musical
Let me preface this review by saying I generally despise musicals in a very, very serious way. I still have nightmares about Moulin Rouge, and the mere thought of seeing The Producers on Broadway is nearly enough to make me vomit blood. I bought my mom the Sound of Music DVD last Christmas, with the […]
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Alien body double
More than three decades ago, the television show Star Trek first chronicled the voyages of the starship Enterprise as it ventured through distant galaxies and strange seas of thought — “boldly going,” as the voice-over stated, “where no man had gone before.” Those journeys almost always included a confrontation with an alien species or civilization, […]
