Godfrey Cheshire

The Edge of Heaven opens Friday in select theaters. For anyone who considers bookstoresthe real, independent kind, not the chainsas places with a very special magic and importance, there’s a scene in Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven that will be immediately captivating. Akin is the young German director of Turkish descent whose breakthrough film […]

Frozen River opens Friday in select theaters The Sundance Film Festival and the Oscars are institutions that often deserve the eye-rolling and exasperation that their common devotion to glitz and middle-brow convention frequently provokes. Yet both have an undeniable usefulness in boosting films that otherwise would face the steepest of uphill battles. Sometimes, in fact, […]

What if they remade Gone with the Wind? Remade it, that is, as a normal-length movie in line with the tastes and production standards of 2008. No doubt the result would not be the monument, the blockbuster or the enduring popular favorite that David O. Selznick’s 1939 original was. But viewers’ feelings about it would […]

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That famous line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance shrewdly appraises our tendency to prefer the comforting simplicities of myth to the challenging complexities of reality. While it wasand remainsa great indictment of the press’ habit of feeding rather than impeding popular fantasies, Ford’s […]

Summer, as we know, is lousy with superheroes. Turn the corner in any multiplex between Memorial Day and Labor Day and you’re liable to be trampled by some dude in titanium tights hurling F/X thunderbolts in a desperate, last-ditch effort to save a dying planetor, more likely, a faltering major studio. Unless you’re 12 years […]

Watching audiences line up for FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON in front of two Manhattan art houses earlier this year, I had no doubt that the French movie’s impressive draw was owed to the preponderance of glowing reviews it had just received, especially Manohla Dargis’ appreciation in the New York Times. Still, I wondered, which […]

Appropriately, coming from a filmmaker whose work contains so many doubles and mirrorings, Jacques Rivette’s latest movie has two titles, which in turn reflect two successive titles of its source material, a story by Honoré de Balzac. In English the film is called The Duchess of Langeais, a direct translation of the new title Balzac […]

When I was a kid, the Village Theater was the sleekest of Raleigh’s few suburban cinemas. Low-slung, with wraparound plate glass windows, this elegant appendage of Cameron Village Shopping Center had an expert staff, great concessions and a beautiful, large auditorium with top-notch projection. All in all, it was a classy place to spend an […]

Click play to watch the trailer (QuickTime) It wasn’t meant as a wisecrack, at least not a mean one. But coming out of Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights, I told my companion that during the movie’s first scene, I realized that I’d had a deep-seated fear of what the result would be if Wong came […]