Screen
Local boy makes God
The old school newspaper headline, “Local boy makes good,” seems to have fallen out of fashion of late. Should we blame the 24-hour news...
Chloe falls flat
Chloe is a conundrum. Envisioned as a psychosexual thriller about a woman scorned, director Atom Egoyan’s latest puzzle is instead little more than a messy affair with mood lighting, sexy lingerie, heavy breathing and swelling, um, music. Everyone here is dripping ...
Dumb wolf in smart sheep’s clothes
To review The Wolf of Wall Street at this stage of the game is to enter into a narrative feud with able critical champions on both sides...
Film on film
In case you’ve had your head under a rock, or simply don’t care how movies are presented, then here is a very brief recap. In the past decade, theaters nationwide have swapped their 35mm reel-to-reel projectors for digital cinema projectors. Promising a clearer image...
Where you been, Laden?
That members of the U.S. Senate have spent more time discussing the fictional depiction of torture in Zero Dark Thirty than they spent discussing the actual torture the military was performing in the wake of 9/11 is yet more proof that “Congress” is the opposite of “...
An animated yawn
Earlier this year Despicable Me proved it: A story about a hapless villain, humanized, is good for a few laughs and a half-billion dollars worldwide. That figure would very likely be A-OK with the makers of the new DreamWorks animated feature Megamind, also about a ...
D.R.E.A.M (dudes ruin everything about movies)
In the first hour of the first massively-budgeted movie centered on a female superhero, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) brags about his dick as Wonder...
The power of discussion
The “road trip” might be the ultimate American movie trope — the vast expanse of the continental United States providing a vivid backdrop while the confines of a vehicle pressure-cook characters in the comedy and drama they need to discover the intricacies of ...
Leave only memories; take only pictures
Images hold a very special place in the mind of the viewer. Simultaneously of one time and timeless, objective and subjective, images bring forth textures and dimensions often lost in memory that can reduce the complex into simplistic categories of black and white...
Where the coconuts are
Zama — the latest from Argentinean writer/director Lucrecia Martel — opens with a parable: There is a fish, a long-suffering fish, which spends its...
So you want to bring peace to the Middle East?
Middle East peace is always a very attractive proposition,” Gamal Helal says. “It’s a very sexy topic. I cannot think of a secretary of...

















