Godfrey Cheshire

Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm, a big-budget fantasy-action spectacle starring Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, has the kind of production history that trade journals conventionally–and sometimes rather euphemistically–describe as “troubled.” The film started out under the aegis of MGM, and then in midstream changed studio horses to Dimension Films, the successful fiefdom of Bob Weinstein, […]

Quirk world Is Miranda July’s debut feature as good as everybody says? Since its January debut at the Sundance Film Festival, Miranda July’s comedy Me and You and Everyone We Know has emerged as one of the year’s most popular and critically acclaimed indie films. A critic friend recently opined that the film looks like […]

“Rap is coming back to the South,” enthuses Shelby (D.J. Qualls), a geeky white boy who, at this moment in Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow, is smoking a joint while taking a break from recording a rap song written and performed by a black Memphis pimp. Full of genial stoner verbosity, the moonlighting sound engineer […]

The following observation is partly a joke, but it contains enough truth that I offer it here with a straight face. With serene predictability, every three years or so the New York Times Sunday Arts and Leisure section prints an article excitedly proclaiming that France’s cinema has produced a “new New Wave.” This, of course, […]

I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve seen a European film as vibrant and compelling as Fatih Akin’s Head-On, but this lacerating German production easily outpaces anything turned out lately by Almodóvar, von Trier or the other supposed leading lights of European cinema. In fact, in its passion, intelligence, stylistic verve and focus […]

Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, a bleakly idiosyncratic comedy about a girl who falls in with born-again Christians after her parents force an abortion on her, is easily the past year’s most courageously original and provocative American film. So you would think that all viewers who cherish cinematic daring and freshness would be united in a chorus […]

When movies underwhelm us, the reason often lies, at least in part, with our expectations. That obviously was the case in my recent first encounter with Moolaadé; by Ousmane Sembene, the 81-year-old Senegalese director who has been called “the father of African cinema.” Sembene’s latest made its national debut at last fall’s New York Film […]

Without any close competition, Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle has a lock on the title of the year’s most exuberantly imaginative and dazzlingly entertaining film to date. Filled with eye-popping martial arts stunts, outlandish-unto-surreal comedy and constant visual inventiveness, this Hong Kong import is bound to make many Americans reflect on how seldom Hollywood turns […]