Thursday, October 27th, 2011
Tabloid
The confessional documentary is as morally gray as a tabloid and as potentially colorless as a broadsheet. If a subject is made to play the fool, whose fault is it? Are they marionettes or the scene-stealing stars of their own one-man shows? Embedded in those answers is our permission to exercise an alienable right that [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, July 14th, 2011
The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick’s movies are often called “magical,” and that’s typically not applied in the pejorative; but his sway has elements that Lord Voldemort, his unlikely box-office competitor, might be jealous of. “He is trying to film God,” Mick LaSalle believes; he’s “attempting … to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
Paul
In the olden days, comedy troupes like the Marx Brothers didn’t have the luxury of sticking with their favorite directors; they got whoever the studio threw at them. But the writing-and-acting team of Nick Frost and Simon Pegg have had a kickass collaboration with Edgar Wright that’s resulted in two exhilarating, gut-bursting features: the [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, March 24th, 2011
Vision
I was going batty trying to figure out who the star of Vision, Barbara Sukowa, reminded me of—and then, like a godsmack, it hit me: Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched. This is an odd affinity, considering that Sukowa is playing Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century Rhenish abbess whose resurgence has made strange bedfellows of Catholic, [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, March 17th, 2011
The Adjustment Bureau
The Adjustment Bureau has a rather writerly conception of theology. “The Chairman”—who the movie neither confirms nor denies to be Frank Sinatra—never seems to be satisfied with the most recent draft of Creation, so he’s constantly tweaking it. In order that everything goes to plan, he has agents of the eponymous bureaucracy always on the [...]