Godfrey Cheshire

If the movie prospects for any given autumn are at all related to the summer that preceded it, I think we should be able to resist the temptation to go wild with anticipation regarding the fall of 2000. Last year this time, of course, the story was much different. With innovative films like The Blair […]

Followers of the North Carolina film scene (and its diaspora) should note that the current teen-cheerleader comedy Bring It On is the first big-screen feature by Peyton Reed, a Raleigh native, now resident in Los Angeles, who’s directed videos by The Connells and others. Just over a decade ago at the Rialto in Raleigh, I […]

Does one have to be a North Carolinian to purely and truly loathe Jim and Tammy Bakker? That’s a tough one, you have to admit. When the smarmy gospel-thumpers were plying their trade over the airwaves in the ’70s and early ’80s, their pabulum reached around the globe, and I’m sure there were folks as […]

Gimme Shelter, which has a 30th-anniversary run this week at Durham’s Carolina Theatre, bears one rather dubious distinction: It’s the film I’ve seen more than any other. I guess you could say I was obsessed with it for a spell, back when. I first saw it during its premiere New York run, in late 1970. […]

Most movies radiate the belief that they belong on the big screen. Others, especially certain low-budget or genre items, make sense only in the nether reaches of late-night or cable television. But there’s another breed that occupies a twilight zone between the two: the kind of movie that, thanks to some mysterious essence scientists have […]

Creative historyThere’s only one thing that’s hugely, almost comically ironic about Istvan Szabo’s new movie–its title. Sunshine is about a Hungarian Jewish family and its travails during much of the 20th century. The clan, which was originally called Sonnenschein, made its fortune brewing and selling a tonic called “A Taste of Sunshine.” Subsequent to that […]

It took nearly a century of feature-making for the American film industry to turn out a really good movie about our Revolution, but here, finally, it is. Contrary to all expectations, The Patriot not only finds a rousing, robust, broadly appealing action spectacle in this most bizarrely neglected chapter of America’s past, it does so […]

Watching the coming attractions at a beach theater two summers ago, I saw back-to-back trailers for upcoming comedies, and was struck by their differences. The mild, sorta-amusing one for Tamara Jenkins’ The Slums of Beverly Hills was completely clobbered by the three-minute laff riot advertising the Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something about Mary, which was flat-out […]