Godfrey Cheshire

When any art tilts toward decadence, an anxious aesthetic nostalgia brings forth young would-be artists who produce florid, half-baked imitations of earlier, better works and critics who exhaust the thesaurus in hailing their derivative creations as nothing short of exalted perfection. This, in a nutshell, is the story of Paul Thomas Anderson. It’s not just […]

Three movies into his second career, painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel has staked out distinctive thematic territory: a place where art (and its inevitable concomitant, fame), marginalization and struggles-unto-mortality meet. The shambling, impressionistic Basquiat, still my favorite of his films, dramatized the short, doomed artistic life of Schnabel’s younger cohort in the ’80s New York art scene, […]

Read more Another critic’s opinion: The 10 best films of 2007 Why I won’t see the “year’s best movies” The 10 worst movies of 2007 The year in North Carolina film N.C. Film Office director discusses challenges facing the regional industry For film critics the period between Thanksgiving and mid-December induces a kind of discombobulation, […]

Iraq, as everyone should know by now, was not the problem. When the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, the perpetrators were holed up in Afghanistan, sheltered by the brutal Taliban regime, which came to power largely because of America’s bungled handling of the aftermath of that country’s occupation by the Soviet Union. The Bush-Cheney regime’s […]

“The Americans,” Jean-Luc Godard said in an interview at the time of his 1965 film Pierrot Le Fou, “know how to tell stories very well; the French, not at all. Flaubert and Proust don’t know how to narrate; they do something else.” That characterization of Flaubert and Proustand by implication, French cinema toois, of course, […]

Though it’s surely a coincidence that the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men and Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead are opening locally on the same weekend, viewers will have to decide if the coincidence is a happy one or not. On the positive side, both films show their estimable directors at […]

In Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, Denzel Washington plays the title character, North Carolina-born Frank Lucas, a Harlem drug kingpin who, back during the Vietnam War, became both ghoulishly infamous and fabulously wealthy smuggling heroin from Southeast Asia to the U.S. in the coffins and body bags of dead American soldiers. One of the movie’s key […]

“But isn’t Sean Penn a self-important jerk?” asked my cousin when I told him how much I liked Into the Wild, which Penn scripted and directed. I replied that Penn does indeed have that reputation, which I tend to believe, yet history hardly suggests that estimable works of art always come from simpatico human beings. […]

Finally, the serious season at the movies is upon us. That may draw cheers in some quarters, but it’s not, of course, always an unmixed blessing. Sometimes this time of year rolls around and what we see from Hollywood are clunking engines of pretension that have little to recommend them apart from astronomical budgets and […]

Before Stewart Brand started the Whole Earth Catalog, that omnium gatherum of countercultural brain food, in the late ’60s, he mounted a campaign to force NASA to release photos it had of the earth taken from outer space. He reasoned that these images, with their stunning proof of the planet’s fragile unity, were revolutionary enough […]