Arts and Culture - Film Review | Truthdig

‘Crazy Horse’: A Study in Erotic Abstraction

2012-02-10T06:19:16+00:00

The cabaret’s women are half-naked so much of the time that they are, as it were, clothed in their own nudity. More significantly, I think, the show often presents them very abstractly. In particular, the lighting presents this or that aspect of their bodies in such a way that they lose all particularity. They are not, in these representations, “women,” but are “woman.”

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The Best (and the Rest) of 2011

2012-01-07T00:08:00+00:00

Sorry about this—a 10-best list dragging along in the wake of all the others, which began appearing around Halloween. And it isn’t even a nice round 10 in number. I could come up with only six movies this year. I have my excuses. [Pictured above, Werner Herzog, director of “Into the Abyss.”]

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A ‘War Horse’ and His Boy

2011-12-24T17:08:12+00:00

Boy gets horse. Boy loses horse. Boy (after many adventures, especially by the horse) is reunited with the animal. In terms of narrative, that’s all there is to “War Horse”—except to say that Steven Spielberg’s film is a lovely and touching movie, representing, among other things, a vast improvement on the extraordinarily successful novel and stage play.

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The ‘Girl’ Is Good, but Why Bother?

2011-12-20T19:31:24+00:00

Here’s a paradox I’ve never encountered in several decades of movie reviewing: a perfectly well-made film that there is absolutely no compelling reason to rush right out and see—especially if you’ve been paying attention to recent developments in popular culture.

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‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ … Clunker

2011-12-09T23:26:35+00:00

Under Tomas Alfredson’s leaden direction, the film, which is set in the 1970s when the Cold War was at its height, consists mainly of guys enigmatically sipping whiskey, smoking cigarettes and exchanging meaningful stares.

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‘Hugo’: Resistance Is Futile

2011-12-05T18:01:51+00:00

I was prepared to dislike “Hugo,” sight unseen—wretched excess and all that—so you can imagine my surprise (and your own, when, as you inevitably must, you catch up with it) when I found myself utterly captivated by Martin Scorsese’s film.

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Movies About the Movies: ‘Marilyn’ Charms, ‘The Artist’ Bombs

2011-11-25T18:13:09+00:00

Basically, I love movies about moviemaking. And basically, Hollywood loves making these movies. They have been a well-established genre since Chaplin was a pup. And a pretty good genre it is—there’s nothing like self-regard to bring out the feverish in people.

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‘The Descendants’: Clooney Goes Down Easy

2011-11-18T17:09:29+00:00

We exist today in a climate of movie extremes—extreme action, extreme comedy. There are not many mild, agreeable pictures that take place in pleasant surroundings and set people we can identify with to dealing with issues that at sometime or other all of us will have to engage.

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‘J. Edgar’: Hoover’s Hubris Writ Large

2011-11-09T17:43:14+00:00

This is a brave film. There was a time when J. Edgar Hoover was among the most prominent Americans and there was no way to make a reasonably honest movie about him. Now there is a tendency to ask, J. Edgar Who?

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Missing From ‘March’

2011-10-10T21:58:33+00:00

George Clooney is the nominal star (and director) of “The Ides of March,” a not particularly thrilling, but sort of agreeable, political thriller, in which he is largely AWOL.

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