Screen
Vacant lots
Writer/director Sofia Coppola has made a movie that says nothing about people with nothing interesting to offer who steal from famous people who do nothing to be famous. And unless you’re a talk-show conspiracy theorist, it’s kind of hard to get too worked up about ...
X marks the spotty
Like a car mechanic tasked with repairing a UFO or a political pundit faced with explaining Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments, critically appraising the third...
Don’t bother keeping up
Since The X Files, David Duchovny’s air of undentable diffidence has been his strength (to those who find him dreamy) as well as his limitation (to the others). In the social satire The Joneses, Duchovny plays a salesman who, at a key point, when he truly deserves ...
‘Nine’ is sexy, engaging and stylish
Films are dreams, whether the director is aiming for hyper-realism or whether we’re allowed to fly through the odd, the dreamy, and the troubling of their imagination. Director Rob Marshall’s Nine is a sexy, engaging, stylish and enlightening journey through the ...
Noir, now more than ever
Noir: when they first started making them, they didn’t even have a name for them.
Born from a literary movement popularized by Dashiell Hammett, James...
8,500 miles in my shoes
There are roughly three New Yorks ... First, the New York of the man or woman who was born here ... Second, there is...
Hunters becoming hunted
The 1987 film Predator inspired a number of spinoffs, from the inane (Alien vs. Predator) to the ghastly (Predator 2), and it was definitely time for a reboot before the titular hunter became a tedious cliché. Predators is a nonstop thrill ride of an action film, ...
The Disney ouroboros
It all started in Kansas City with a young dreamer named Walt Disney. Alice’s Wonderland wasn’t his first creation, but it was significant. The...
