We don’t turn to Michael Bay (PEARL HARBOR) for subtlety. Like Renny Harlin, he enjoys blowing things up real good and usually after he’s sent them careening along city streets at breakneck paces calculated to inflict the most bodily and property damage as possible en route. And so it was with some curiosity that I… Read More »
MATCH POINT
Chris (Johnathan Rhys-Meyers), the focus of Woody Allen’s MATCH POINT is an existential man in the proper Sartrian mold making his way in a world, he will learn, that is ruled by the short of absurdist chaos favored by Jean-Paul’s arch-rival, Camus. So much for free will, bad faith, and making one’s own luck. Forget… Read More »
THE BLACK DAHLIA
There are so many missteps in Brian De Palma’s THE BLACK DAHLIA that one hardly knows where to start. Perhaps the best place is with the adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel of the same name. The book is a rich and vibrant work that provides too much fodder for a two-hour film to capture. Instead… Read More »
THE NANNY DIARIES
THE NANNY DIARIES rises above its whiffenpoof premise of a middle-class anthropologist charting the strange and treacherous milieu of an unfamiliar culture and comes up with something that is almost but not quite substantial. The anthropologist in question is the eponymous nanny, and the culture is the Upper East Side New York society in which… Read More »
HITCHCOCK
The splendid thing about HITCHCOCK is that it doesn’t just aspire to tell the story behind the making of PSYCHO. No, this wickedly endearing effort takes on the man, and the mythos behind the man, and then, for good measure, the woman behind both that made them legendary. Based on Stephen Rebello’s book, Alfred Hitchcock… Read More »