Screen
‘The world’s biggest student film’
It was 1983 when British filmmaker Alex Cox turned in his first feature film to Universal Studios. That same week, Cox optioned the rights to one of his favorite science-fiction novels for a future project. The movie was Repo Man. The book was Harry Harrison’s Bill, ...
From a second-rate Bette Davis to a first-rate auteur
They say the future of film is female. It is. But so is the past. Maybe
that’s not evident upon first glance — certainly not...
‘Hockney’ takes a look inside the mind of a painter
I’m interested in ways of looking, and trying to think of it in simple ways,” David Hockney says. “Everybody does look, it’s a question...
When death misses
There was a scene, lo those many (OK, 11) years ago, in the original Final Destination. One of the characters who inadvertently “cheated death” and ruined “death’s grand design” had holed up in a cabin, which then had to be made accident-proof...
Rom-com yawn
The business plan behind CBS Films is simple: midsize projects with good-size headliners, such as Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser of the inaugural CBS Films effort Extraordinary Measures, or Jennifer Lopez, who co-stars with Aussie hunk Alex O’Loughlin in the ...
A portrait of the writers as young men
David Foster Wallace is an ordinary guy. He reads obsessively, eats junk food en masse, is addicted to watching TV, wonders what it is like when Alanis Morissette eats a bologna sandwich and lives his life with a nagging feeling of emptiness. Wallace self-diagnoses ...
Reitman follows ‘Juno’ with ‘Up in the Air’
Airports, with their endless corridors, encourage a kind of...
Corruption of small-town innocence
They were staples of popular literature, Broadway and the movies long before the movies could talk: comic yarns in which small-town naifs pack their bags and hit the big city, where they learn about life and love and what they’ve been missing...
Three colors, three ideas, three masterpieces
The colors belong to the French flag, the corresponding ideas to the Republic: blue, white and red — liberty, equality and fraternity. For France,...
Cinema on the short side
In addition to the
praise and accolades each year’s Oscar nominations bring, there’s a fair amount
of teeth-gnashing and viewers crying foul. A stupid movie got...
The outsider
It was a Saturday in July when Meursault killed the man. The man, an Arab, was lounging on the sun-drenched beach when Meursault approached....
