Screen
Home viewing: ‘Pierrot le Fou’
It’s the story of boy meets girl, but it’s all mixed up. He’s Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a married man with kids. She is Marianne...
Roll out the barrel
Martin has been immobilized. He’s only 40, but the life drained out of his face years ago. His wife barely talks to him, and...
Wildly contradictory and totally true
Practically everyone knows of Tonya Harding, the figure skater connected with kneecapping her competitor, Nancy Kerrigan, prior to the 1994 Winter Olympics. But how...
‘Couples Retreat’ a waste of talent, unfunny
Director Peter Billingsley had a tough assignment: take four suburban couples and put them through a series of "relationship building" challenges that were thought-provoking, poignant, revealing and funny. In attempting to accomplish this, he makes everyone a crass ...
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...
Home viewing: Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3
In 1990, Martin Scorsese brought together a band of cinema enthusiasts to protect motion picture history by creating The Film Foundation (TFF) — a...
The place where imagination becomes real
Just as every journey begins with a single step, a lifetime of passion blossoms from a simple aha moment.
“My junior year in college I...
Reading cinema
They always say write the book that you want to read,” Brad Weismann says. “I was looking for a reference book that covered the...
Revenge with a twist that falls short in ‘Citizen’
Law Abiding Citizen is the latest in the bad-lawyer genre, with Jamie Foxx as careerfocused attorney Nick Rice, who accepts a plea bargain from the killer of affable inventor Clyde Shelton’s (Gerard Butler) family to ensure his excellent trial outcome record...
The sickness unto death
What is there left to say about Woody Allen, the 79-year-old writer/ director of 45 feature films, a dozen of them masterpieces? Better yet, what does Woody Allen have left to say? Averaging a little more than a movie a year since his inauspicious debut in 1966 (What...
You can’t always get what you want
Tenet opens not with a bang, but with an explosion. Chaos coordinated with cinematic clarity courtesy Christopher Nolan. The setting is a concert hall...
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 ...
