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Let ‘Argo’ Take You Hostage
Oct 16, 2012 I don’t know how much of the picture -- beyond its basic premise -- is "true" And, frankly, I don’t give a damnI don’t know how much of the picture—beyond its basic premise—is "true.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Cult of Personality
Sep 18, 2012 The critics simply have too much invested in the still young director to acknowledge that "The Master" has to rank somewhere between a disappointment and a disaster.
The ‘Dark Knight’: 3 Hours of Apathy
Jul 23, 2012 We want it to be good. We certainly don't want it to be the occasion for tragedy. What we are forced to settle for, though, is aimlessness.
Woody’s Latest Riff
Jun 30, 2012 There is no reason not to see something like "To Rome With Love" It’s an amiable film But it’s also something like a bag full of querulous cats, brimming with comic ideas that only occasionally come together in sustained, well-developed riffs" It’s something like a bag full of querulous cats, brimming with comic ideas and the occasional well-developed riff.
The Good-Natured Dictator
May 21, 2012 No movie dedicated to Kim Jong Il can be all bad. On the other hand, "The Dictator," the product of Sacha Baron Cohen, cannot be all good either.
‘Monsieur Lazhar’: Tragedy and Humanity
Apr 13, 2012 At its best, "Monsieur Lazhar" is something very rare in film: a study in self-containment.
‘Bully’: Zooming In on Childhood Demons
Apr 2, 2012 Is bullying on the rise in schools around the country? I don’t know You don’t know And, most important, Lee Hirsch, director of the documentary “Bully,” doesn’t seem to know either Is bullying on the rise in schools around the country? I don’t know .
‘The Deep Blue Sea’: A Forgettable Affair
Mar 26, 2012 It may be that, as Americans, we are the victims of a cultural disconnect. At the height of Terence Rattigan's fame, the Brits invested a good deal of admiration in his attempts to extend the reign of the carefully constructed prewar "problem" play into the postwar era. We need to see some joy from the adulterers, some sense of the world well lost for love.
Filmmaker, Incarcerated
Mar 6, 2012 One of the incidental lessons "This Is Not a Film" teaches is that a film is not a film until it is a film. You can talk about it, outline it, enthuse over it, but it is still just hot air until sets are built, actors engage, cameras roll. And that is what's most touching about this movie. Jafar Panahi is a well-known Iranian filmmaker who has been sentenced to six years in jail and a 20-year ban on making movies (or even talking about them to the press).
‘Crazy Horse’: A Study in Erotic Abstraction
Feb 10, 2012 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.” I’m not saying that Frederick Wiseman's film lacks in bare breasts and bums—there’s more than enough of them to satisfy the merely lubricious.