With ABOUT SCHMIDT, Alexander Payne fixes the same acute eye he used in both CITIZEN RUTH and ELECTION to once again rip the façade of wholesome gentility from the upper middle class of the heartland of America and to show us the savagery beneath. Again Payne has chosen the milieu Nebraska, the home of the… Read More »
MAX
As an exercise in ethics, people have been known to ponder the morality of going back in time to kill Hitler before he rose to power and committed any crimes against humanity. Some though, to adhere to the polar opposite sort of principles that Hitler espoused, thought a much more effective way to stop him… Read More »
THE HOURS
THE HOURS begins with a suicide, a famous one at that. Virginia Woolf with a fierce deliberateness puts a heavy stone in her pocket and walks into a river. We see her head duck silently into the water and then her body floating delicately away, pulled by the current with a gentle urgency. By the… Read More »
QUIET AMERICAN, THE
THE QUIET AMERICAN is a subtle, deeply disturbing film with a performance by Michael Caine that is a marvel of understated elegance, delivering an emotional punch of prodigious proportions. Based on the novel by Graham Greene, it tells the story of a romantic triangle that is emblematic of the intrigues surrounding Vietnam at the time… Read More »
RECRUIT, THE
Its such a neat idea for a flick — an intricately plotted tale of spies playing both sides against the middle with a gazillion twists and turns and no one, especially the audience, quite knowing where the middle is until the end. And one day, if were good, well get a flick like that. For… Read More »
DARKNESS FALLS
The best thing about DARKNESS FALLS is the fact that we will be able to settle once and for all whether or not there is a tooth fairy. If he or she exists, there is bound to be a lawsuit over how he or she is depicted in this film. Actually, not so much the depiction, though… Read More »
BLIND SPOT: HITLER’S SECRETARY
BLIND SPOT is an oral history released as a feature documentary. Ordinarily, this would be a bad idea, oral histories being low-tech and single camera, but the subject is Traudl Junge and her history is of her years as Hitlers secretary. Filmmakers Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer must have known they were on to something… Read More »
THE GURU
THE GURU is a fluffy confection that mixes the exuberance of Bollywood with measured lunacy of 30s screwball comedies and adds just a dash of The Joy of Sex to leaven the mixture with a millennial sensibility. Our hero is Ramu, an Indian dance teacher who was marked as a child by seeing John Travolta… Read More »
BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM
BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM is an unpretentiously charming comedy about the family ties that bind, sometimes too tightly. It did major box-office in England, where it was produced, and has done more than respectable business everywhere in the world that it’s played. It’s about time it made it to our shores here in the states. What sets this film apart… Read More »
SCOOBY DOO
Let me put this in context for you. Libraries are woefully underfunded. Too many of the elderly are forced to choose between their prescription drugs and their rent. Teachers in the public school system are barely paid a subsistence wage. But somehow in a world turned upside down, there were tens of millions of dollars to be… Read More »