Thursday, December 15th, 2011
Hugo
Big airports have always fascinated me. Thousands of passengers zipline back and forth on any given day: maybe on business, maybe coming home, maybe for a layover—perhaps as a tourist or gadabout. It’s a model U.N., with representatives from every part of the world trying to get to every other, but few transients stop to [...]
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Thursday, December 30th, 2010
Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler was near-great. It may have been diffuse around the edges, but it had Mickey Rourke for its beating heart—and Marisa Tomei just out of his reach. Released to theaters between President Obama’s election and inauguration—and on the heels of the economic crunch—it gave an “ordinary” American workingman the chance to do [...]
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Thursday, November 25th, 2010
Hereafter
Watching Hereafter is like spending Halloween at church. Clint Eastwood has been directing a lot of Hail Marys at us lately; he’s made a career of repenting—of cleaning Dirty Harry’s blood off his hands. Here, working with the playwright Peter Morgan (who wrote The Queen and the light-on-its-feet Frost/Nixon), there isn’t a spot of blood, [...]
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Thursday, August 26th, 2010
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
When I saw Hot Fuzz back in 2007, with a couple of compadres, it was like quaffing a cinematic yagerbomb; all I wanted to do afterward was cut loose, do a few keg-stands, and then chittychat my way into some soon-to-be-regretted-but-blissful stupor. What I’m saying, I suppose, is that Edgar Wright’s film put me in [...]
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Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Inception
When Leonardo DiCaprio washed ashore at the beginning of Inception, I thought that Jack had survived the sinking of the Titanic. But if he had, it would only be to drown in the subconscious depths that this movie layers on. Don’t get me wrong: This new film, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, is artful [...]