Screen
Jedi mind tricks from ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’
"Is this really based on facts?” a fellow critic asked the studio rep at the screening of The Men Who Stare At Goats. “Does it matter?” I responded, and I was right, it doesn’t. Whether it’s factual or just a riff on the craziness of modern military and contemporary ...
Ford v Ferrari
There’s a scene halfway through Ford
v Ferrari where Carrol Shelby (Matt Damon) takes Henry Ford II (Tracy
Letts) for a spin on the test-track in...
Lower-case Spielberg
In general, I’m not a big fan of holding artists accountable to the standard set by their best work. Making something “good” after making something “great,” doesn’t mean that the good thing is any less objectively good or that the great thing is any more great. What ...
An embarrassment of riches
Every year is a great year for the movies, but when was the best? Was it 1939, the year Hollywood gave us The Wizard...
Many days in the life
Like Same Time, Next Year with less guilt or When Harry Met Sally ... with a somewhat different ending, One Day pops in and out of the lives of characters played by Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess across two decades, spanning university graduation to older, wiser 40...
Now we are 63
In 1964, Britain’s
Granada Television charged researcher Michael Apted to select 14 7-year-olds
from disparate backgrounds for the documentary program, Seven
Up! Their aim: to get a...
Home Viewing: Melissa Tamminga on ‘Stories We Tell’
About halfway through Sarah Polley’s 2013 documentary Stories We Tell, Michael Polley turns to his daughter and asked, “What is this documentary about?”
Well, it’s...
No country for poor men
Like a slow, rumbling thrum, the inevitability of Hell or High Water’s final act patiently chugs at you. One of those rare, gritty, morally...
Too much violence — despicable
Despicable Me is a surprisingly violent animated movie that suffers from being released within a few weeks of Toy Story 3. Where Toy Story 3 has warm characters who seek to do well by each other, Despicable Me is populated by characters who constantly hurt each ...
