LIVE BY NIGHT is so sumptuously photographed that it can almost make up for its shortcomings. Based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane, it has weathered its translation by becoming a slight story heinously overblown. It also suffers from too many false endings. So many, in fact, that I can’t vouch… Read More »
THE DROP
There are many remarkable things about THE DROP, but the foremost is the way in which it so perfectly evokes its film noir roots. Set in the seamy underbelly where might is right and cops can do little but wring their hands, it is a world dark in thought and deed, where the wrong thing… Read More »
THE DEPARTED
With THE DEPARTED, Martin Scorsese has taken a good film, the Hong Kong minor classic INFERNAL AFFAIRS, and remade it into a movie that is as bloated as it is bland. Gone is the dramatic tension of a slick action flick, gone is the suspenseful psychological subtext that pondered the nature of identity, subsumed into… Read More »
SMOKIN’ ACES
Somewhere in Joe Carnahan’s SMOKIN’ ACES there is a really good film trying desperately to get out. Several actually. And therein lays the problem. Dashing blithely as he does through several different genres Carnahan shows moxie and a genuine flair for each one: black comedy, gut-wrenching drama, farcical silliness, and a deeply affecting morality tale. It’s… Read More »