Godfrey Cheshire

Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet casts Ethan Hawke as the bummed-out Dane and sets the play in glitzy, present-day Manhattan. Knowing only that, anyone’s entitled to the same healthy skepticism that I took into the film when I first saw it at the Sundance Film Festival in January. But be prepared for a surprise. This Hamlet is […]

Future extraterrestrial excavators of our doomed civilization will no doubt marvel that the three best bands in the form known as rock music–R.I.P.–were memorialized by three of the best examples of the generally hopeless genre known as rock movies. The Beatles of course got A Hard Day’s Night (1964), the Rolling Stones Gimme Shelter (1970), […]

A ways into Disney’s new animated feature Dinosaur, just after we’ve been fully acquainted with our scaly hero and his furry friends, a meteor strikes the earth. You will recall this episode from the science lore of our own era. Sixty-five million years ago, it is said, a meteor’s impact wiped out the dinosaurs. But […]

If the ’90s were the decade of independent film, the ’00s are already clearly marked as the decade of digitization. What this means, in a sobering if not yet fully comprehensible nutshell, is that the traditional, old-fashioned, gears-and-wheels mechanics of cinema are rapidly being replaced by the whizbang electronic technology of television and computers, the […]

The film under review this week is a magical new movie from Iran, Majid Majidi’s The Color of Paradise, which concerns a poor blind boy’s relationship with his embittered father. But as a way of approaching that, permit me to relate something that happened to me two weekends ago that proved unexpectedly clarifying regarding Iranian […]

The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola’s extraordinary debut feature, reminded me of a film to which it bears little outward resemblance, Terrence Malick’s Badlands. No doubt, some will find that comparison a little strange. Malick’s masterpiece, after all, is largely identified with its subject and story, which effectively launched a whole subgenre of similar films. As […]

As an aficionado of ancient history and the sword-and-sandal movie genre that went into eclipse over three decades ago, I was greatly anticipating Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. No doubt due partly to those expectations, I came away from it mildly disappointed. Jointly mounted by DreamWorks and Universal at a reported cost of $100 million, this gladiatorial […]

Reviewing William Friedkin’s Rules of Engagement here two weeks ago, I forgot to note one thing: what Friedkin’s rancid, godawful war movie is really about. Ostensibly, it’s about the military and a Marine commander (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who’s excused for murdering his prisoners or innocent civilians whenever he feels like it. But let’s […]

There are bad movies and bad movies, and then there’s the rarity that I watch thinking “Why is God punishing me? What did I do to deserve this?” William Friedkin’s Rules of Engagement is that bad, the kind that’s not funny or merely annoying but actively, deeply excruciating. And appalling. And depressing. I thought that […]