Admittedly, compiling 10-best lists is a weird enterprise. Most film critics I know do it as almost as a Talmudic duty. The task starts as soon as the year begins. With every new film encountered, you think, “Is it 10-best material?” In some ways, it’s a convenient method for chronicling any year’s ups and down. […]
Godfrey Cheshire
Posted inNews
The rising mainstream
Admittedly, compiling 10-best lists is a weird enterprise. Most film critics I know do it as almost as a Talmudic duty. The task starts as soon as the year begins. With every new film encountered, you think, “Is it 10-best material?” In some ways, it’s a convenient method for chronicling any year’s ups and down. […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Love in the middle ages
Though we’re still in the midst of the year-end movie crunch, I can’t believe the season will produce a bigger or happier surprise than Nancy Meyers’ Something’s Gotta Give. I read the film’s premise–Jack Nicholson as a babe-obsessed Lothario who falls for his current babe’s mom, Diane Keaton, who in turn is romanced by dashing […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Once upon a time in the East
In Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise plays an embittered 1870s veteran of America’s Indian wars who goes to Japan to serve the newly modernizing government, but ends up siding with the regime’s foes, a proud clan of Samurai warriors. Barely a half-hour into the lushly made period movie, I was struck by a […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Turning leaves, churning seas
I’m not given to searching the calendar for milestones, but it recently occurred that this month marks 25 years that I’ve been writing film reviews for Triangle readers. My stint began shortly after Spectator magazine–for which I was both a fledgling critic and neophyte arts editor–began publishing on November 15, 1978. The first movie I […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Bright world
One way to explain the perennial attraction of the New York Film Festival is that alongside a few movies destined for the multiplexes and a larger handful that will never make it beyond the precincts of film festivals, it offers the first U.S. glimpses of certain titles that will become the cream of the art-house […]
Posted inFilm & Television
The feminine Mystic
Movies are such an immediate medium that our evaluations of them are tied almost inextricably to the experience of watching them. Very rarely do I feel one way about a film at its end, then feel an entirely different way a few hours later. Yet that’s exactly what happened when I encountered the latest movie […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Hey kids, rock ‘n’ roll …
I’m not given to opening reviews with superlatives, but Richard Linklater’s The School of Rock deserves every word of praise the world is about to heap on it. It’s the funniest comedy of the year, the most superbly made Hollywood film in recent memory and, overall, the best major-studio production we may see in 2003. […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Jaded in Japan
Perusing some arbiter of pop-cultural commentary one day in the mid-’90s, I came upon the startling news that fashion models were the latest embodiment of “hip” and “cool.” I remember staring at this item with the wonder of someone who realizes he’s just stumbled into a new, not altogether congenial era. Back when terms like […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Ex-cons and cons
Olivier, the main character in an extraordinary film called The Son by Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, is a stolid plug of a man. With his beefy frame, balding pate, jowly face and eyes shielded by thick glasses, the middle-aged vocational instructor has an almost archetypal nondescriptness. If you passed him in the aisles […]