Over the opening credits of the Coen brothers’ new movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou? we hear Harry McLintock singing “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” a song which (I seem to remember) was once an anthem of the revolutionary International Workers of the World or “Wobblies” and which enjoyed a renewed vogue during the Depression…
In The Pledge Sean Penn (director) and Jack Nicholson (star) have teamed up to give us a portrait of the hero as “a drunk and a clown” — which has a certain appropriateness, I suppose. There’s even a part for Mickey Rourke here — to say nothing of cameo roles for such actors as Tom…
“She was too good for this life. . .” wrote Philip Larkin of the graffiti-covered bathing beauty on the advertising poster for “Sunny Prestatyn” and his ironic pity came to mind as I watched Gillian Anderson piling up the pathos as Lily Bart in Terence Davies’s screen adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of…
What I liked about Pollock, directed by and starring Ed Harris, is that it really does convey an impression of what a nasty man Jackson Pollock must have been—not, that is, nasty in the mealy-mouthed, surreptitious, hypocritical way that people are generally nasty these days but nasty in that old-fashioned, full-bore, unashamed way that people…
The Franco-German director Dominik Moll’s new film is called Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Veut du Bien, which means, “Harry, a friend who only wants the best for you.” For its American release it has been given the slightly misleading English title of With A Friend Like Harry. . ., but in other English-speaking countries…
Shadow of the Vampire, directed by E. Elias Merhige, is very slight but frequently entertaining, mainly because of the performance of Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, acting the part of the actor who acted the part of the vampire in F.W. Murnau’s classic of 1922, Nosferatu. Murnau himself is played with typical menace by John…
Here I make my declaration of faith: the single most important element in film is plot. This is because film is an inescapably realistic medium. You can’t make it look not like life, though, God knows, an awful lot of people have tried. But it is life in motion, which means that it cries out…
The Franco-German director Dominik Moll’s new film is called Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Veut du Bien, which means, “Harry, a friend who only wants the best for you.” For its American release it has been given the slightly misleading English title of With A Friend Like Harry. . ., but in other English-speaking countries…
Here are the good things about Traffic, Steven Soderbergh’s new and ambitious — and, indeed, epic-scale movie treatment of what is still here and there called the “drug war.” It does not glamorize drug taking, or drug supplying, though about a third of it deals with the first and about two- thirds with the second. Nor does it…
One tries to be fair, of course. I admit up front that I don’t much like either Matthew McConaughey or Jennifer Lopez, and I acknowledge that it is very likely that my dislike is what accounts for what seems to me the total lack of “chemistry” between the two of them in Adam Shankman’s The…
Anyone who has ever had anything to do with schizophrenia will tell you that there is nothing attractive or heroic or artistic about it, but the romantic myth that there is dies hard. The talented Samuel L. Jackson is the latest star prepared to take on the role of holy madman in The Caveman’s Valentine,…
There are just enough good things about Cast Away by Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Contact, What Lies Beneath) to make it worth seeing. These are as follows: (1) what is perhaps the most thrilling and frightening representation of a plane crash on film; (2) magnificent photography of the South Seas and the island where Tom…
