Category: 3 Stars
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Ridley Scott adapts Joseph Conrad’s The Duellists
Ridley Scott’s first feature film The Duellists (1977) is based on the Joseph Conrad short story “The Duel.” Feraud (Harvey Keitel) and D’Hubert (Keith Carradine), two French soldiers serving under Napoleon, become loyal enemies locked in a lifelong adversarial relationship. D’Hubert, eager to appease his superiors and advance his career, volunteers for a mission in…
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The Coen Brothers confound expectations, as usual, with Burn After Reading
Although every Coen Brothers film is unmistakably theirs alone (can the Auteur Theory apply to more than one person at once?), Joel and Ethan have a reputation for rarely making the films audiences want or expect from them at any given time. After Fargo, when everybody wanted another snowy midwestern noir, Joel and Ethan gave…
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De Niro and Grodin are somewhere between Toledo and Cleveland in Martin Brest’s Midnight Run
Martin Brest’s Midnight Run is an appealingly loose comedy built on a solid premise. It’s a classic, almost cliched Hollywood scenario: Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) is one of the world’s last honest cops, rewarded for his integrity by divorce and demotion to the humiliating (and dangerous) level of bounty hunter. His handler Eddie Moscone…
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Ghost Town is The Sixth Sense as a romantic comedy
David Koepp’s Ghost Town pulls at the heartstrings without being too nauseating. With a tagline that implies The Sixth Sense as a romantic comedy, its tone and subject matter are roughly comparable to As Good As It Gets: the thawing of a misanthrope with some good qualities. It mostly earns it, but the last 2-3…
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Le fugitif: Guillaume Canet’s Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One)
Guillaume Canet’s Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) enjoyed a surprisingly wide US theatrical release for a French film without huge English-speaking stars (except for Englishwoman Kristin Scott Thomas, perfectly fluent in French). Roger Ebert rightly compared the tightly crafted thriller with The Fugitive, placing it squarely in Hitchcockian wrong-man-accused territory. Pediatrician Alex Beck…
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Wong Kar-wai’s American road movie My Blueberry Nights
Wong Kar-wai’s first English-language film My Blueberry Nights is mostly set in bars and diners across America. His characters all indulge in the four great American pastimes: eating, drinking, gambling, and driving. Nobody films beautiful women, or should I say, nobody films women beautifully, like Wong Kar-wai. In Blueberry Nights, he has no less than…
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Malcolm McDowell checks in to Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital
Since we’ve last seen Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) in O Lucky Man!, he’s moved to America and rediscovered his lust for power and profiteering. Now a member of the media (with no less than Luke Skywalker – Mark Hammill – on his crew), he has returned to his homeland on a mission to expose corruption…
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Daniel Day-Lewis is Natty Bumppo in Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans
This blogger is a longtime fan of director Michael Mann, counting Heat, The Insider, and Collateral among my favorite films. But I still can’t find much love for what is probably his most popular movie, The Last of the Mohicans, which seems to lack his typically intense focus and clarity. Based on the James Fenimore…
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Batman wants to be taken seriously in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight
I really wanted to like The Dark Knight. Director Christopher Nolan (also cowriter with brother Jonathan) and star Christian Bale have long proved themselves thoughtful, serious filmmakers, but if they have one common flaw it might be a terminal deficiency of levity. The Dark Knight inarguably has all the hallmarks of quality, intelligence, and craft,…
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The Rashomon effect in Pete Travis’ Vantage Point
Vantage Point is an awesome technical achievement, and I don’t mean that to damn it with faint praise. Director Pete Travis and writer Barry Levy demonstrate excellent plotting, spatial sense, editing, logistics, and continuity. As a thriller it moves forward relentlessly, and feels comprehensible, self-contained, and very satisfying. It is structured around a single gimmick,…