Godfrey Cheshire

Grindhouse is now playing throughout the Triangle. Given that it runs three hours and 11 minutes and comprises two feature-length movies along with an assortment of bogus trailers, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse might be called a cinematic Double Whopper with Cheese, oozing grease, ketchup and a dare to find a better bargain anywhere […]

To the news that Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax dramatizes the famous scandal associated with the name Clifford Irving, many prospective viewers are bound to respond, “Clifford who?” Those of us who remember the Nixon era, on the other hand, may well recall the name yet remain fuzzy about the man and the reasons for making […]

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu opens Friday at Chelsea in Chapel Hill. At the end of last year, as I noted at the time, 107 North American film critics polled by IndieWIRE named The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a sophomore feature by 30-something Romanian director Cristi Puiu, the best movie of 2006. As one of […]

The mere title of Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan is insinuating enough, but have you seen its posters? They show a simpering, scantily clad white femalea nympho?with a heavy chain wrapped around her, a chain held by a sweating, muscular black man clad in one of those sleeveless white T-shirts known as “wife beaters.” The […]

“Worst. Oscars. Ever.” The admirably concise e-mail from a critic friend handily summed up my own reaction to last week’s announcement of the Academy Award nominations. No, I’ve never spared too many grains of salt for this tinsel-bedecked horse race, which seems to grow more crass and self-defeating as its award-show competition metastasizes. Still, I […]

Serving on the jury for debut films at last year’s Montreal World Film Festival, I was reminded how often evaluating films revolves around disagreement. Yet while our small, intensely opinionated jury disagreed about most of the awards we had to decide, we were surprised to find that we were in instant accord about what should […]

Why is Warner Bros. opening two high-profile movies about the World War II era, Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima and Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, in a single Triangle multiplex this weekend? If you know how to read the industry tea leaves, that one’s not too hard to decode. Warners has important, longstanding relationships […]

Jump to article… Reeling in the years | This year’s model | Next year’s model? | Our year in DVDs Godfrey Cheshire has written the liner notes for eight films by Wim Wenders in a new DVD box set released by Anchor Bay Entertainment. His audio commentary can be heard on the New Yorker Films […]

Starting with the Bay of Pigs debacle, then flashing back to the early days of U.S. espionage during World War II, and continuing through the creation and development of the CIA during early decades of the Cold War, Robert De Niro’s THE GOOD SHEPHERD offers the most capacious dramatic account of America’s intelligence service I’ve […]