James Morrison

The Wide Blue Road is an early film by Gillo Pontecorvo, the director who gained international fame a decade later with The Battle of Algiers in 1966. For those who have seen the later film, a monument of political cinema, the first word to come to mind is likely to be “uncompromising,” so it’s hard […]

At this year’s long-postponed Emmys, Ellen DeGeneres’ only mean jibe, as the smartly pixieish emcee, was a slam at Steve Martin. Dramatically ignoring him, she leaned across Martin to interview the seat-warmer in the chair next to him. Then, straightening, she feigned sudden recognition and exclaimed, “I loved you in the Naked Gun movies!” It […]

In Hollywood in the 1940s, working on the adaptation for Howard Hawks’ classic film noir The Big Sleep, William Faulkner realized he couldn’t figure out the solution to the mystery. Who, in the end, had really killed whom, and why? Faulkner called up the author of the book, Raymond Chandler–or so legend has it–and was […]

The Death of Cinema that we hear so much about now may really have started long ago, with the failure of 3-D. Of those films of the ’50s that tried to compete with television by adding a third dimension to the movie screen, courtesy of awkward cardboard specs, none was particularly distinguished artistically. Hitchcock’s 1955 […]

A governess in a country mansion, hiding behind a curtain as she plays hide-and-seek with her young charges, looks up to see a demonic face looming outside the window before her, then inexorably drawing away. A woman doing laps after hours in the pool of an abandoned gym thinks she hears something, and treads water, […]

You could drive a ’71 Newport, if not a 16-wheeler, through the holes in the plot of Joy Ride, John Dahl’s road-movie neo-noir horror film. Then again, if you can still stand this sort of thing, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t. Of its type, it’s fine; its type, though, is the schlocky Hollywood thriller, […]

Those who are traumatized measure time as a Before–if they are able to recall one, or willing to invent one–and an After. It’s sometimes instructive, After, to look back to the Before. The week before, a film called The Glass House was heralded in the nation’s metallic, hivelike cineplexes. It did not appear, however, until […]

Fear and loathing and vengeance, those time-honored staples of popular entertainment, recur in predictable but still unexpected form in Legally Blonde, a teeny-bopper comic strip disguised as a movie. Its interest, if any, is sheerly anthropological. Near the end of the movie, after Reese Witherspoon, as a jilted bimbo, delivers a triumphant comeuppance to the […]