A few days after seeing Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble, I glimpsed a poster for the film, which in prominent type promises “Another Steven Soderbergh experience.” Obviously, the point is to “brand” the director for sales and marketing purposes, and given that, you might think that Soderbergh was getting a mite self-important. But I’ve always given the […]
Godfrey Cheshire
Posted inFilm & Television
Woody rallies
I have a critic friend who came out of Match Point declaring it Woody Allen’s best film since Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). Does that mean he holds Allen’s work of the last two decades in lower regard than I do, or that his estimation of this new film vaults higher than mine? Both, probably. […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Somewhere over the rainbow
Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain first met the world at last fall’s Venice and Toronto film festivals, and though it won the top prize at the former event and was widely cited for Heath Ledger’s outstanding lead performance, there was little sense in the initial press reports that a critical and commercial blockbuster had just been […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Ten best movies of 2005
“Have you seen Brokeback Mountain?” That’s the question I hear most as 2005 rockets toward its finale, and my answer’s at the ready. Yes, I’ve seen Ang Lee’s gay-cowboy love story (which opens in the Triangle in January). And I liked it enough to include it among the honorable mentions you’ll see below, but not […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Nowhere men
Arriving after months of hurried production in near-total secrecy, Steven Spielberg’s Munich must be counted a monumental, jaw-dropping surprise. A riveting account of Israeli assassins hunting down Palestinians in retaliation for the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Spielberg’s latest is not only the year’s best movie, far and away, it’s […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Ishtariana
Does it matter that viewers will come out of Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana having no clue what the title means? I would say that it’s less directly problematic than it is directly symptomatic. Forget the title. The whole of Syriana is so opaque, poorly conceived and well-nigh incoherent that most discerning viewers (as opposed to the […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Wages of fear
One of the most amazing and revelatory experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater occurred three weeks ago at a multiplex in suburban New Jersey. The occasion was a subscription series of upcoming releases where I sometimes moderate post-screening discussions. I faced the task in this instance, I’ll admit, with a certain amount of […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Riders to the sea
Tim Kirkman’s Loggerheads is the second of two indie films set and made in North Carolina by N.C. natives to reach Triangle theaters this season. Though it’s been noted here before, I think it’s worth stressing how unusual the phenomenon they comprise is. Every year over 2,000 films are submitted to the Sundance Film Festival, […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Proving it
One January evening in the mid-’90s when Quentin Tarantino was at the peak of his Pulp Fiction fame, I happened to enter the annual banquet of the New York Film Critics Circle alongside him. While Tarantino has an impassive great-man visage that he wears when surrounded by paparazzi and admirers, it abruptly changed as we […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Ku Klux hip hop hits home
This has got to be a first: A grand cinematic celebration of the creation of the Ku Klux Klan, presented in the very bosom of Southern liberalism, UNC’s newly reopened Memorial Hall, and backed, no less, by a hip-hop soundtrack. Improbable as it may sound, that’s the order of the day this Friday in Chapel […]