Archive for November, 2009
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
An Education
In the past few weeks, I’ve reviewed four movies set in the 1960s. (One can see the autobiographical filmmakers’ distress: Starting January 1st, it’ll be accurate to say that the ’60s were a whopping 50 years in the past. Perhaps we’re experiencing a collective baby-boomer mid-century crisis.) The best of the lot is An Education, […]
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Thursday, November 19th, 2009
The Men Who Stare at Goats
The Men Who Stare at Goats is one of the best-titled films I’ve ever reviewed. If only it lived up to its name. To be fair to the screenwriter, Peter Straughan, and the first-time director, Grant Heslov, the subject they’ve chosen is a minefield for fair-minded adapters. They’ve drawn from a book by Welsh muckraker […]
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Thursday, November 12th, 2009
Pirate Radio
Pirate Radio is like a confirmation of those highly embellished stories parents tell about how cool things were when they were growing up. In other words, it’s a fairly lame movie. The English writer-director Richard Curtis has taken more liberties with history than the film (or its ads) indicates, but if you were to remove […]
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Thursday, November 5th, 2009
A Serious Man
It has not been easy to put to words what made A Serious Man, the new film written and directed by the Coen brothers, such a drag, but perhaps I can get at it this way. Their last movie, Burn After Reading, was a delightful farce about self-serious bureaucrats and needling nincompoops, but the playful […]