Thursday, January 28th, 2010
Broken Embraces
Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces is an attempt at film noir; it comes off as film rose. The movie has all the elements that Americans have come to expect from romantic European exports—it’s leisurely, uninhibited, sophisticated, pretty. But Almodóvar tries to jam the appurtenances of old-school American pulp on to the frolicsome Old World obverse, and [...]
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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 [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
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 [...]
7 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Monday, October 6th, 2008
Burn After Reading
In No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers declaimed that the sky was falling, and used allegorical constructs to bolster their assertion. In their new film, Burn After Reading, they’re dealing with human characters, and look upon the sinking sky with a shrug, as if to say: “Who cares? It’s just caving in on [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Monday, March 10th, 2008
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
[Note: Here’s another sampling from the “olden days”—of my review for a movie that should have been, but sadly wasn’t, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.]
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is almost as long as its title, but it may be the most valiant attempt at truly literary [...]