Film
Paranoid Park: Gus Van Sant Among the Skate Punks
The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant’s masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film’s…
Arts & Culture
Not just a period film, La Chinoise, blazing in all its glory
Not just a period film, La Chinoise, blazing in all its glory on a new 35mm print, is…
Arts & Culture
Not just a period film, La Chinoise, blazing in all its glory
Not just a period film, La Chinoise, blazing in all its glory on a new 35 mm print,…
Film
CJ7: Stephen Chows Latest Chopsocky Comedy
Something of a departure for Hong Kong’s reigning master of special-effects slapstick Stephen Chow, CJ7 is a…
Film
Chicago 10: Not the 60s Again!
Thirteen months after Hubert Humphrey was nominated for president in a hall ringed with barbed wire and…
Film
Rambo: Sly Stallone as National Icon
He’s back–unflagging, indestructible, super-colossal. Through this epoch-defining figure one may refract American history. John Updike has his Rabbit…
Film
Summer Love: Polish Cowboys Kill Val Kilmer!
The first feature by the conceptual Polish artist Piotr Uklanski, Summer Love is a mock spaghetti Western that…
Film
The Violin: Mexican Peasants Revolt, but Artfully
Writer-director Francisco Vargas’ first feature, an evocation of the 1970s Guerrero peasant revolt, is a solemn, suspenseful,…
Film
There Will Be Blood: Daniel Day-Lewis Devours the American West
A great brooding thundercloud of a movie, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood arrives as if from…
Film
Youth Without Youth: Coppola Should Stick With the Winery
Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed return to the fray is a curious project—well-crafted, personal, and movie-movie old-fashioned even…
Film
The Walker: Woody Harrelson Versus the Neocons
Paul Schrader’s cinema is largely defined by the pathology of his male protagonists, and with The Walker,…
Film
Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains: An Infomercial From the Left
Jonathan Demme, who directed Tom Hanks to an Oscar as the AIDS-afflicted lawyer in Philadelphia, may be…
Film
Southland Tales: Richard Kelly Scrambles the Future
Richard Kelly shoots the moon with his rich, strange, and very funny sci-fi social satire. The political phantasmagoria…
Film
Terrors Advocate: Learning to Love Pol Pot
Anyone wishing to ponder the origins and fate of the European New Left, as well as the development…
Film
American Gangster: Denzel Washington Gets All Godfather
American Gangster is a movie with obvious gravitas and a familiar argument: Organized crime is outsider capitalism. As…
Film
Wristcutters: Death Is the New Aphrodisiac
This well-wrought indie, written and directed by Goran Dukic, has to be the Kewpie doll of current zombie…
Film
Before the Devil Knows Youre Dead: Philip Seymour Hoffman Will Rob His Own Parents!
Less Sidney Lumet’s comeback than his resurrection, this violent family melodrama is his strongest movie in at least…
Film
For the Bible Tells Me So: Scripture May Not Be So Queer-Averse
Though it opens with the cathartic spectacle of Anita Bryant getting a cream pie in the kisser and…
Film
Lake of Fire: Like the Abortion Wars Never Ended
Named for the spot in Christian-fundamentalist hell where sinners are condemned to spend eternity, Tony Kaye’s Lake of…