Godfrey Cheshire

I’m tempted to write, “Flawless very nearly is.” But that would miss the point. One can find flaws in any movie, even the greatest. What counts is the whole and how it affects us, flaws and all. In the case of Michael Radford’s deliberate and stylish diamond-heist film, the emotive sum is definitely greater than […]

David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels strikes me as the best new fiction film of 2008, as well as the filmmaker’s most accomplished work to date. I wish those judgments reflected a broad consensus, but they don’t. Reviews of the movie have been all over the map, which no doubt says something not only about the […]

I realize the title of Martin Scorsese’s concert documentary Shine a Light comes from a Rolling Stones song, but did no one consider how awfully ironic it is? Lend an ear to the Stones as their music comes thundering at you from a darkened stage and you get the sensation of virile, endless youth. But […]

This is one of those abundance-of-riches weeks for Triangle filmgoers, since it will see the arrival of two of the year’s most important films, one the winner of 2008’s Best Documentary Oscar, the other the recipient of the 2007 Palme d’Or at Cannes. I wish I could devote a full column to each of these […]

The post-Oscar period has developed a well-deserved notoriety as a dumping ground for films that studios and distributors don’t expect to set the world on fire (putting it mildly). Sometimes, of course, that means the films really stink. Other times, more happily, it merely means they’re small, off-beat or otherwise commercially marginal. Roger Donaldson’s The […]

“The Sound and the Fury would have gone out of print in the 1940s if Malcolm Cowley hadn’t published The Portable Faulkner.” That line may not sound like a come-on, a finely calibrated instrument of seduction, but it isin two senses. In the opening moments of Andrew Wagner’s excellent chamber drama Starting Out in the […]

Given that the animated feature Persepolis, based on Marjane Satrapi’s acclaimed graphic novels of that title, depicts an Iranian girl’s coming of age from the Iranian Revolution in the late ’70s to the restrictive culture of the Islamic Republic in the early ’90s, it might be expected to suggest various parallels to Iran’s recent cinematic […]

In the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, a crusty, taciturn old-school Texas sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones delivers recurrent monologues (longer and more numerous in the source novel by Cormac McCarthy) on a theme that might be concisely summarized as “America going to hell.” Evil is eternal, but the country he grew […]

For reasons I can’t quite fathom, Fox Searchlight decided to give Tamara Jenkins’ superb The Savages its national launch at the end of the year, a time crowded with Oscar candidates that are generally big, brash and noisy in their ambitions. The Savages, by contrast, is human-scale, quietly droll and endlessly subtle. It also happens […]