Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Alice in Wonderland
Tim Burton’s misadventures in Wonderland are woefully miscalculated. Unlike Alice, who chased her dream down the rabbit-hole, the director seems to have stumbled into it. His Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is a hole in the screen—an A-hole, to be precise. In this conception of Lewis Carroll’s 19th-century whimsies, the ingenue has been aged to the brink […]
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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, January 14th, 2010
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
I slipped into a 6:40 show of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at 6:50, hoping to have only missed some previews; instead, I apparently missed out on half the plot. Unless the director, Terry Gilliam, has devised a newfangled approach to storytelling that condenses an hour or more of exposition into a five-minute intro, I […]
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Thursday, December 31st, 2009
Up in the Air
More than a century has passed since the Wright Brothers first took off from Kitty Hawk, but flying still retains some of its romantic appeal. Nothing represents freedom better than defying gravity, hurtling hundreds of miles per hour across the sky. The vistas turn towns into toys as you drift through those polymorphous clouds. Life […]
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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 […]