“If Ocean’s Eleven manned up and went to war,” or, “The feel-dead movie of the year.” This begs for lame taglines.
The Man Who Knew Too Little (dir. John Amiel, 1997) – This one’s always been fun and always will be. In the 90s, Bill Murray swung back and forth between…
Saw this one the other week at the Stanford Theatre during the wonderful Kurosawa run (which is not yet over). First time to have seen it in 35mm, which was…
The film Comedian is exhausting, in part in a good way and in part not so much. The “good” exhausting comes from watching Jerry Seinfeld try to develop a new…
Howard Hawks is noteworthy in cinema for lots of reasons; he’s infamous for just a few. Among them is Hawks’ history of battling the censors. Before the Hays Code came…
Rear Window is a marvel. It’s called “pure cinema” at times, and unsurprisingly. They say 8½ is the best film about film ever made, but we should lighten the requirements…
The Virgin Spring was part one of an epic triple-feature the other day. First was this one, sadly on an iPod Touch. Second was Rear Window from a DVD projected…
A kind of love-child of Buñuel and Leone with more biblical and religious symbolism than one knows what to do with, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surrealist Western El Topo follows a cowboy/priest…
These old Woody Allen films are pretty delightful: intelligent slapstick overflowing with enough word plays and sight gags that the viewer might do well to hit “pause” while laughing so…
Although notorious for its narrative content and ultimately rather hopeless, The Graduate deserves points for being a remarkably funny snapshot of early twenties malaise in upper-class suburbia. Dustin Hoffman’s character…
In Wes Anderson’s corpus of work, The Life Aquatic may just be the archetype, the consolidation of style & theme, the compressing of all-things-Wes into one film that overwhelms and…
Famous and infamous, this is really a remarkably adept film from a technical point of view. While working with other Verhoeven material on the day job (namely RoboCop), it seemed…
