Godfrey Cheshire

In the classic mold of haunted house movies, The Others features an old mansion full of shadowy rooms and long, dark corridors. But perhaps the most murky, labyrinthine thing about the film is the network of relationships implied in its credits list. The movie was written and directed by a Chilean-born Spaniard, Alejandro Amenábar, age […]

For anyone who relished the idea of Tim Burton remaking one of the most durable sci-fi films of the ’60s, the new Planet of the Apes must be counted a disappointment. Not a horrible letdown, mind you. The interstellar special-effects spectacular has enough going for it to justify a look-see by fans of the original […]

On December 20, 1909, Ireland got its first full-time movie theater when the Volta cinema opened on Mary Street in central Dublin. The venue’s mastermind and chief programmer was an impecunious writer named James Joyce. Returning to Ireland from his self-imposed exile in Trieste, Joyce thought he had hit on a surefire moneymaking scheme, and […]

Gal Dove (Ray Winstone) loves his swimming pool. When the droll British crime comedy Sexy Beast opens, Gal is splayed out in the Spanish sun next to his pool, a couple of beer bottles nearby. He’s thinking about how infernally hot the sun is, as people do when they endure its discomfort in search of […]

When I started telling friends, a bit less than a decade ago, that there was some extraordinary filmmaking going on in, of all places, Iran, I would confront stares of puzzlement, followed usually by signs of rapid mental calculation. What kind of good films, people wondered, could Iran possibly be producing? The most ready assumption […]

In The Phaedo, The Republic, and Theaetetus, Plato expresses the profound paradox inherent in the concept of consciousness and a human’s ability to freely choose. On the one hand, human beings partake of the natural world and are subject to its laws. Our brains are natural phenomena and thus must follow the cause-and-effect laws manifest […]

It’s the beginning of summer and we’re in a seaside resort. It could be Myrtle Beach or Topsail, but this beach town happens to be on the northeastern coast of Spain. For teenagers like Nico and Dani, the best time of the year has arrived: summer vacation. Better yet, Dani’s parents have just left on […]

To chronicle and, more importantly, to morally assess the go-go years of the Reagan ’80s, we had a handful of outstanding fictions, including Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (forget Brian DePalma’s misfire of a movie). To capture the dot-com gold rush of the late ’90s, though, fiction is […]

Big. Splashy. Campy. Kitschy. Surreal. Color-drunk. Tune-crazy. There are any number of descriptive tags that could be accurately applied to Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, whether or not you end up liking this big-budget attempt to reinvent the movie musical. But there’s another adjective that’s as unavoidable as it is perplexingly ambivalent in its implications: postmodern. […]

The bottom line on the hunka hunka steamin’ summer blockbuster known as Pearl Harbor is that, history apart, it’s not nearly the atrocity I expected it to be. Running just 10 minutes shy of three hours (set your watches–the battle doesn’t arrive till 90 minutes in), this admitted attempt to marry the patriotic onslaught of […]