Godfrey Cheshire

Appearing on the Charlie Rose show a few weeks back, New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman was asked about his initial support for the Iraq war, which he now deems a mistake. Typically, the fatuous pundit did not apologize for cheerleading for a conflict that has now cost untold thousands of lives. His position, […]

Though its telegraphic title is an inarguable asset, the new Western 3:10 to Yuma could be called The Bandit and the Homesteader. Russell Crowe plays an outlaw who gets captured after robbing a heavily armed stagecoach. Christian Bale is a desperately strapped rancher who accepts $200 to transport the desperado to a nearby town, where […]

There’s been a small flood of documentaries about the Iraq war in the last two years, and movie-industry pundits have ruminated over why they’ve largely failed to click at the box office. Besieged with depressing war news at every turn, American filmgoers, it is said, would rather see something else. That may be, but Charles […]

“Little Dieter Needs to Fly is not a great Werner Herzog film, but because it’s a good Werner Herzog film, it’s of greater interest than almost anything else out there at the moment.” So began my review of the 1998 documentary that has now been given dramatic form in Rescue Dawn, and my sentiments regarding […]

Sicko opens Friday in select theaters. If any movie ever seemed capable of starting a revolution, Michael Moore’s Sicko is that film. But of course, no mere movie can cause a revolution; intolerable conditions do that. And that’s the key to Sicko‘s success. It targets a subject that’s already a revolution waiting to happen: the […]

Though movie stars generally dominate the celluloid vehicles in which they appear, it’s relatively rare that an actor transforms a run-of-the-mill movie into something well-nigh unforgettable. But that’s the case with La Vie en Rose, a biopic about legendary French singer Edith Piaf. If Hollywood can stifle its usual xenophobia, then Marion Cotillard, who gives […]

Sweet Land opens Friday in select theaters. It has been at least a decade since the tag “American independent” suggested a film of humanity, vision and genuine artistic purpose. During that time the term has degenerated into a marketing label too often attached to slick, meretricious movies that merely ape Hollywood’s empty formulas, albeit usually […]

The most beautiful and entrancing nonfiction film to reach the Triangle so far this year, Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence has a title which might befit a Jacques Cousteau undersea odyssey but actually describes an extraordinary voyage into a realm no less mutely wondrousa Carthusian monastery high in the French Alps. From the first moments […]

If many arthouse films nowadays seem destined to divide audiences into generational camps, the absorbing Canadian drama Away from Her has the welcome effect of bridging the age divide in several senses at once. Credit for that belongs largely to two extraordinary actresses working on opposite sides of the camera. Born in 1979, Sarah Polley […]

Like other great cities, London has exercised such a strong presence in movies over the years as to be considered not just a setting but a character itself. There was the stiff-upper-lip London of the blitz and World War II. The swinging London of Blow-Up and other trendy ’60s films. The punk/multi-culti London that dominated […]