James Morrison

Last Orders is a somberly beautiful new movie based on the 1996 Booker-prize winning novel by Graham Swift. The only previous film based on a Swift novel, Waterland, was a case-study in how not to adapt a serious work of literature to the screen: It literalized the book’s metaphors and allegorized its literalism. By contrast, […]

In Y Tu Mamá También, a spirited road movie by the Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, two boys named Tenoch and Julio set off on a trip with an older woman, Luisa. The boys have met Luisa–who’s married to Tenoch’s callous, arrogant cousin–at a wedding in Tenoch’s upper-class family. The boys proposition her but she resists; […]

It must be difficult to remain an amateur for over 30 years, but that, by dint of sheer will, is exactly what director Henry Jaglom has achieved in his career. His new film, Festival in Cannes, is the work of one of the most distinguished amateurs in moviemaking. It tells the story of two competing […]

Filmgoers familiar with the aesthetic of Dogme 95 will find the new entry, Italian for Beginners, a surprise–pleasant or unpleasant, depending on their proclivities. Taken on its own terms, the film is fresh, emotionally full and direct, funny, poignantly generous of spirit, charming and crowd-pleasing, without seeming really compromised or unduly sentimental. But the more […]

Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his long and painful dotage, has stopped looking like a cross between a robot and a moldy beefsteak. It’s difficult, these days, to say what exactly it is that he resembles, though we can exclude species that dwell in the realm of the human. He has become an odd amalgam of collagen, […]

Halfway through Monster’s Ball, Mark Forster’s bleak Southern-gothic tragedy of redemption, you’ll think it can’t possibly get any worse. And mercifully, you’ll be right. If you can tough out the bleak procession of calamities that make up the film’s first hour, then it’s all uphill from there. The drive toward redemption of the second half, […]

Three men–two Bosnians and a Serb–are stranded in a trench between the lines of battle: no man’s land. One of the men is lying atop a land mine. If he gets up, the mine will blow. He is a Bosnian who has been placed there by Serbs who thought he was dead and wanted his […]

This weekend, the Carolina Theatre in Durham presents once again the Nevermore Horror, Gothic & Fantasy Film Festival, for which the festival organizers have assembled a heady mix of films that you’ll probably have no other chance to see on Triangle screens. That’s certainly the case, it’s safe to predict, of what is for me […]

At an English country manor house in 1932, a group of aristocrats gathers for a weekend hunting party. They cavort, drink, quibble, languish, deliver themselves of off-handed epigrams, cuckold one another, and drink some more. One of them, at a certain point, is murdered. A perfunctory, lightly comical investigation follows, and then the aristocrats depart, […]