Screen
The only living boy in Boo York
Disney has a record of racial sensitivity rivaled only by emails from loathed uncles with subject lines that start “FW: FW: FW: RE: Obama.”...
You ain’t seen nothing yet
"It ain’t like it used to be. But it’ll do.” So says one grizzled old timer to another at the end of 1969’s The...
Five unforgettable films from a master
Mike Nichols was a rare one. He began in comedy, moved to the stage and then made his way to Hollywood, where he forever changed the face of cinema. Sandwiched between the French New Wave and the New American Cinema, Nichols helped bring movies back into the adult ...
Learning the wrong lessons
An employee of the Chicago public school system, ha-cha seventh-grade educator Elizabeth, portrayed by Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher, blows most of her classroom time showing her students (whose names she never learns) movies such as Lean on Me, Stand and Deliver and...
‘Real people love us!’
When Talking Heads frontman, and all around art rock god, David Byrne was contacted by a color guard team looking to license one of...
Shiver me tides
We first met Johnny Depp’s memorable Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and it was a delightful film, a fun amusement park ride even more entertaining than the eponymous Disneyland ride upon which it was based...
Preach, Spike. Preach.
Spike Lee is many things; subtle is not one of them. In 1989 — with three movies under his belt — the Brooklyn-based producer/director exploded on to a grand stage with Do the Right Thing. The movie stirred the pot and caused a fair amount of controversy, but what ...
A patient Western
At one point in Meek’s Cutoff, set in 1845, the frontier settler played by the excellent, plain-spoken Michelle Williams fires two warning shots after an alarming encounter with a Native American. Hurriedly she loads the rifle with gunpowder and ammunition, while ...
Mamma Roma
Few filmmakers are as divisive as the great Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini. He was a novelist, a poet and a provocateur even before he...
Scenes from a marriage
Out in the hinterlands of Iceland, a married couple is grieving. Some time ago, they lost a child. It has created a noticeable rift...
