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 […]
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Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Cold Souls
Cold Souls is a diaphanous nocturne—a little metaphysical flower lilting in the gray autumnal light. Paul Giamatti plays himself or, rather, the person we might infer Paul Giamatti to be, given the schlub-everyman he incarnated in American Splendor and Sideways. He’s playing in Chekhov on Broadway, but can’t get out of his own head and […]
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Thursday, July 16th, 2009
The Brothers Bloom
At a time when I’m fraught with accusations of joylessness—specious as the claims are—it’s a relief to express the fun I had at The Brothers Bloom. Bloom isn’t “mainstream”—it’s an indie film, whatever that distinction is worth—but it has oodles of charm and energy (enough, I imagine, to satisfy most viewers), and little of the […]
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Saturday, November 8th, 2008
Martyrs
Seeing the new French horror film Martyrs is like going trick-or-treating and ending up with a frayed philosophy text in your pillowcase. The writer-director, Pascal Laugier, has modernized the biblical story of Job—who lost everything, except his faith in God—by giving it the grindhouse treatment, grafting on the carnage of cheapo slashers. His heroine is […]
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Sunday, September 28th, 2008
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
From the way most American films perceive Southwestern Europeans, one might think that the Old World has graduated past employment. All its inhabitants are retirees with nothing better to do than paint, write poetry, and—mais oui!—make dirty, dirty, sexy love. This atmosphere of leisure is about the opposite of the low-pressure system that perpetually hovers […]