Godfrey Cheshire

Coming away from lunch with Pari, an Iranian-born friend who’d recently seen Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, I kept recalling two things she said. First: “In Iran, people at all social levels know poetry and quote it to each other constantly, for all sorts of reasons. When I moved to the United States, […]

Unbreakable, the latest from Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan, is a fascinating mess. I have a feeling it’s gonna get beat up by many critics and probably will leave a lot of viewers befuddled and disgruntled. But I came out of it high on the sheer exuberance of the filmmaking and eager to watch […]

George Tillman Jr.’s Men of Honor is one of those Hollywood movies for which the term “old-fashioned” is both a compliment and a mark of the complimenter’s reservations. An uplift-minded story of personal and racial achievement set against the backdrop of the U.S. military circa the 1950s and ’60s, the film is itself an honorable […]

Handsome, square-jawed blond guys in elegant golf togs, pursuing the game’s own grail down the misty fairways of memory–if that adds up to a movie, it’s one Robert Redford could direct in his sleep, right? Apparently. Redford’s The Legend of Bagger Vance, which attempts to do for golf what Hallmark did for Christmas, feels less […]

A few years back, a publicist called up trying to interest me in a new French film called La Vie de Jesus. “It’s made by a former professor of philosophy,” she chirped brightly. When I told her I’d already seen it, she asked what I thought. “I thought it seemed like a film made by […]

For eye-popping spectacle, the Iranian Oscars–as I call the event known locally as the “Feast of Cinema”–suffered not at all when compared to its gaudy American counterpart. There was music. There was dancing. There were enormous displays of film clips, proud evocations of the cinematic past and acceptance speeches full of tears and gratitude. Granted, […]

Robert Altman’s new film is called Dr. T. and the Women, and its eponymous physician–a gynecologist, no less–is played by Richard Gere. But let’s start with the women, because unlike Richard Gere, they comprise a subspecies you don’t see on many movie screens. They are not just Southern women, and not just upper-class white Southern […]

As we were saying: The century of cinema is over, forms like the European art film are fast disappearing into the acid bath of the videocybersphere, and most proofs of cinematic “art” belong more and more to the curators, the historians and that pimply faced kid at Blockbuster. Faced with such daunting realities, filmmakers will […]

Like cinema itself, the Telluride Film Festival seesaws on a delicate question: How does any movie stand a chance when competing with the most spectacular of nature’s beauties? In a commuter plane half the size of a subway car, you slingshot vertiginously over soaring rock faces and alight, as if by Aeolian caprice, on a […]