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In the history of cinema, there have been few genres that have been as thoroughly examined as the gangster movie. Dating to the early days of silent film, when the German expressionists were likely the first true practitioners of the ‘noir’ aesthetic, there have always been a handful of directors [...]

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more apathetic actor right now than Sam Worthington, an Australian whose appearances in Terminator Salvation and the gazillion-dollar-grossing Avatar have inexplicably transformed him into Hollywood’s go-to guy for big-budget CGI extravaganzas, the latest being this adequately entertaining remake of the cheesy 1981 fantasy flick.

Italian cinema was once distinguished for its postwar “neorealism” movement, with films that were shot on location in a stripped down, almost documentary style, exemplified by titles like Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1946) and de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). Times seem to have changed, though not necessarily for the worse. With a [...]

As the American film industry drifts further into a sort of retarded infantilism–week after week of superheroes, television show remakes, stunted 80’s nostalgia for things that weren’t any good in the first place–it‘s important to remember that, on the fringes, there is still a filmmaker or two out there who is [...]

I wrote up Atom Egoyan’s last effort, Adoration. I thought it was a strong return to his previous cinematic achievements like The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica. I neglected to mention the movies that had come in between like Felicia’s Journey, Ararat, and Where the Truth Lies.  This omission is [...]

Tom Ford is a power player in the world of fashion, having previously chaired the houses of Yves Saint-Laurent and Gucci, as well as his own fashion line. With his self-funded film adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man he makes his directorial debut.

The most recent film from action director Antoine Fuqua, Brooklyn’s Finest is the story of three seemingly unconnected cops walking the Brooklyn beat. Ethan Hawke plays a detective with money problems, namely buying a house for his pregnant wife and apparently unending stream of children. Don Cheadle plays an undercover drug [...]

2009 marked the anniversaries of two of the greatest milestones in human understanding. 400 years ago last year, Galileo Galilei turned his improved telescopes to the sky and found new evidence that the earth was not the center of the universe. 150 years ago last year, Charles Darwin published “On the [...]

For a filmmaker who has fashioned a career out of dissecting the savage torpor of modern existence, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon comes as something of an oddity. A story of strange occurrences in a tiny German hamlet on the eve of WWI, the film carries with it a bundle of [...]

Cinematic War fatigue, a syndrome afflicting most Americans over the last six years that involves the understandable symptoms of choosing escapism as entertainment over ‘realism’, has claimed many victims at the box office. Many of these films weren’t necessarily worthy of much attention, anyway, either due to their ideological stridency [...]