Smart Words About Cinema
Contributor
[Originally published in Movietone News 49, April 1976] Ripeness has gone to rot with a vengeance in Richard Lester’s latest film. In some wasteland out at the edge of the world (patently not a holy land) a one-eyed old man and some women and children hide out in a cracked, ungarrisoned castle and do not [...]
Like most casualties of Noirland, Foley (Samuel L. Jackson) is pretty much DOA from the get-go. Haunted by the moment he put a bullet into his grifter partner’s head, he gets out of jail after a 25-year stretch to find his world mostly emptied of old friends, lovers, fellow thieves. Foley walks heavy, age and [...]
When a director throws a cinematic frame around an actor, literally dictating how audiences will see the man or woman caught in the camera’s gaze, that’s real power—and it can be a form of possession. The high-voltage connection—between a filmmaker’s visual imagination and the performer who brings it to life—can be mutually productive, a fertile [...]
Japanese Railways commissioned writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda to make I Wish as publicity for the Shinkansen bullet train. In response, the director of Still Walking” one of 2010′s best, delivered a cinematic poem. Nothing much happens in this happy tribute to the gentle art of being human, unless you count a bunch of immensely likable kids taking a long [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] There are two kind of people in The Steel Helmet: those who are dead and those who are about to be; men who have ceased to move anywhere and mean anything, and those whose idiosyncratic, even crazy energy keeps them in motion until they too are stopped [...]
As the weather warms up, so do our movie screens. Summer’s the season when hulky superheroes rise and tentpole franchises rule, all aiming to break the bank big-time. Get ready for close encounters with a posse of cinematic bad boys — dark knights, men in black, aliens and bloodsuckers, grifters and drug lords. Grrl power [...]
Opening April 27, The Raven stars a serial killer who reenacts the famously grotesque homicides conjured up by Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) in his many tales of perversity. During his final drunken, drug-addled days, the writer who invented the detective genre helps the police hunt down the mocking murderer. To mark The Raven‘s flight, we invite you to savor [...]
The Raven casts Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) as a P.I. of sorts, a not entirely surprising role for the writer credited with inventing detective fiction. During the final week of his life, the down-and-out writer teams up with the Baltimore police to hunt down a killer who copycats grisly homicides based on Poe’s “The Murders [...]
The Moth Diaries closets a clutch of Lolitas in an all-girls’ boarding school, the only male within hailing distance a lit prof (Scott Speedman) who gets off on teaching vampire fiction — “sex, blood and death” — to his itchy charges. Then a new student, affectless, pale as a ghost, strangely lacking any appetite for institutional [...]
The Lady, Luc Besson’s handsome biopic about Aung San Suu Kiy (Michelle Yeoh), may be largely a dramatic dud, but there are a couple compelling reasons to watch it. The saga of Burma’s Joan of Arc (recently triumphant) transcends pedestrian filmmaking, and one is grateful for Besson’s honorable, if undistinguished, effort to commemorate this Nobel Peace [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] What partly recommends and partly handicaps The Omen, the latest entry in the horror film genre, is its old-fashioned quality. The film develops its tale of the modern-day birth of Satan’s son with a modicum of special effects and supernatural gimcracks, relying instead on tried and true [...]
Boy, was I not looking forward to Goon! The Great White North’s favorite gladiatorial sport, Jason-masked hosers wielding hockey sticks, slo-mo arcs of ketchup … not to mention Stifler (Seann William Scott) on steroids? But it turns out this little movie’s a charmer, perfectly calibrated as a sweet, slow-cooking sports comedy (and love story), chock-full [...]
Images, lines, gestures, moods from the year’s films — Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Control (John Hurt), aced out of MI6 after the disaster in Budapest, announces, “Smiley is coming with me.” Smiley (Gary Oldman), his back to the camera, tilts his head a millimeter — surprise? acceptance? both?… — The Descendants: the sound Matt King’s [...]
Welcome 2012 with one last look back at the best releases of 2011, as seen by the contributors to Parallax View. Critics listed in reverse alphabetical order Andrew Wright (as posted at Salt Lake Weekly) 1. Melancholia 2. Rise of the Planet of the Apes 3. Cave of Forgotten Dreams 4. 13 Assassins 5. Drive [...]
MSN Movies published its annual Best of the Year poll this week, featuring Top Ten lists from thirteen MSN writers including a trio of Parallax View contributors: Richard T. Jameson, Kathleen Murphy and Sean Axmaker. The rest of the line-up isn’t too shabby either: Jim Emerson, Don Kaye, Glenn Kenny, Kim Morgan, Mary Pols, James [...]