Godfrey Cheshire

Apocalypto Opens Friday throughout the Triangle Mel Gibson, our leading purveyor (and practitioner) of Extreme History, is back with another paean to the ecstasy of agony. Less dogmatic than The Passion of the Christ, with blue body paint to equal Braveheart, Gibson’s Apocalypto manages to make Mesoamerican pre-history as heart-thumpingly entertaining as a Rambo sequel. […]

Bobby opens Thursday throughout the Triangle. When an actor sets out to make a movie about politics, what ends up predominatingacting or politics? If the answer to that isn’t blazingly obvious, you might want to consult Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, a sprawling drama about the day Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Though featuring 22 name performers […]

Casino Royale opens Friday throughout the Triangle By happy happenstance, I encountered Casino Royale, the newand sensationally successfulJames Bond film on Election Day, a coincidence that led to politically tinged musings on why this four-and-a-half-decade-old spy fantasia remains cinema’s most durable franchise. Is it not that Bond is that rare thing: a hero who magically […]

The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a documentary by David Leaf and John Scheinfeld, opened nationally a couple of months ago to reviews that seemed quick to nitpick over its supposed faultssuspiciously quick, I’m tempted to say. It’s directed in a bland VH1 style, some charged. Because all of Lennon’s music and image rights are controlled […]

We all know what the last three Martin Scorsese movies have in common: They star Leo DiCaprio. Now, let’s look at what separates them. Gangs of New York, an uneven but fascinating drama of 19th-century Gotham thug life, came from a book that had long obsessed the director: It was, in short, a passion project […]

In the decade or so since movie companies became narrow-focused on releasing their serious, adult titles in the prime Oscar-campaign months of November and December, the issuing of such films in September has become less and less frequent. Yet it’s still held in reserve by some studios as a counter-strategy meant to give an edge […]

It’s not often that I come away from a movie feeling mesmerized solely because of the way it evokes a bygone period of history, but Patrice Chéreau’s Gabrielle had that mysteriously exhilarating effect. Based on a story by Joseph Conrad called “The Return,” Chéreau’s film concerns the sudden breakdown of a marriage, and I won’t […]

As I try to do with most movies, I went into Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center knowing as little about it as I could, avoiding its trailers, ads and advance press coverage. And as often happens, this strategic ignorance led me straight into a surprise. Here’s the movie I expected to see, based on a […]