Godfrey Cheshire

When the Taiwanese film Three Times opens, it will mark a significant milestone for Triangle art-film aficionados. It will be the first time a movie by Hou Hsiao-hsien–a director who many critics have long considered one of the most important filmmakers in the world–has had a local theatrical run. If the name isn’t familiar, that’s […]

I wouldn’t count this a virtue in most movies, but in the first few scenes of Superman Returns–the most elegant and surprisingly resonant of comic-book extravaganzas–I felt a pronounced sense of chronological disorientation, and I couldn’t tell how much of it–if any–was intentional. Bryan Singer’s movie opens with the dastardly Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) bilking […]

Understandably, Davis Guggenheim’s riveting global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth leaves a number of questions hanging, including the biggie: Will the approaching environmental catastrophe it warns of be averted, or will we soon witness places like the Outer Banks, Manhattan, the Bay Area and Bangladesh sliding beneath the waves with the same kind of dumbstruck horror […]

Accepting an honorary career-achievement Academy Award on this year’s Oscar show, Robert Altman revealed that he had undergone a heart transplant not long ago. The comment caused a bit of a stir, since news of the filmmaker’s operation had been closely guarded. Naturally, the revelation prompted thoughts not only of the octogenarian director’s remarkable resiliency, […]

Call me an incorrigible pointy-head, but The Da Vinci Code strikes me as quite possibly The Silliest Story Ever Told. The only appropriate cultural response to the goofy metaphysical thriller will be the inevitable parody by the makers of The Naked Gun or Scream. Watching Ron Howard’s creaky movie version I kept thinking, “People take […]

Of the various ways to assess the understated excellence of United 93, a comment by one of the cast seems to me particularly on-target. Describing writer-director Paul Greengrass, Susan Blommaert, who plays a passenger on the doomed 9/11 flight, said, “I feel like Paul is anti-sensationalist and an anti-sentimentalist.” While anti-sensationalism and anti-sentimentality are negative […]

Satire is one of the trickiest, most difficult movies genres, given that it involves a delicate balance between genuine written and cinematic wit on one hand and a ripe, topical target on the other. Perhaps that’s why truly great satires like Robert Altman’s The Player and Gus Van Sant’s To Die For come along only […]

I don’t know that I’ve ever had a reaction to a movie as extreme as the one I had to Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden). Watching the French production, mesmerized, at last fall’s New York Film Festival, I recall thinking, “This may be the year’s best film.” Walking out of the theater I still felt that […]

Of all the showbiz personages who departed the mortal realm during the past year, the one I most regret not having met was Ismail Merchant. Merchant, who died last May at the age of 68, was not only one of the most celebrated and successful of independent producers, half of the creative team that made […]