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You know a lot of time has passed when the best comedy of 2009 is about the run-up to the Iraq war. Now, to be fair, the debut film from BBC comedy veteran Armando Iannucci isn’t specifically about the U.S. invasion. Neither Bush nor Blair are ever mentioned by name, and Iraq isn’t, either. It’s [...]

Director Michael Mann’s fascination with the criminal mindset has offered both television and movie audiences some of the most compelling underworld entertainment of the last 30 years. While Miami Vice allowed him to buy a very big house, it was furnished via more intellectual efforts, such as TV’s Crime Story, the James Caan vehicle Thief, [...]

Suicide, as the song reminds us, may be painless, but it has also been played for laughs more in the last 20 years than one would have thought possible. Once romanticized as the final vestige of a sensitive soul, it’s now looked upon as a selfish act, the idea of martyrdom in hopes of obtaining [...]

The word of the day is ‘anachronism.’
I’ll trust that you know what the word means; if not, put simply, let’s call it ‘not of its time.’ Bloom writer/director Rian Johnson, I can assure you, knows exactly what the word means; both of his films-the earlier, Brick, and his latest, The Brothers Bloom-are what one could [...]

A shaggy-dog tale propped up almost exclusively by its stars’ immeasurable charisma, Rudo y Cursi is nonetheless an entirely engaging Mexican fairy tale about two bickering brothers who find brief, and sudden, fame on competing soccer teams. Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, lifelong friends in real life, first starred together in Mexican telenovelas as [...]

What would you be willing to do if you’d hit rock bottom? This is the rather open-ended question at the heart of Julia, an effectively bracing crime thriller starring Tilda Swinton in the lead role as Julia Harris, a 40-ish alcoholic who, at our very moment of introduction to her, clearly has very little to [...]

Nominally billed as a murder mystery, director Jean-Luc Godard’s lost 1966 comic book film has as much to do with film noir as hamburger does with a doorknob. This slight and charming cinematic episode, which due to financial reasons has rarely ever been seen in the forty years since its original release, is notable for [...]

The story of Scott Walker is, on its face, not too different from that of many pop idols of the last fifty years. A handsome man with a remarkable baritone voice, Walker, first as a member of the Walker Brothers, and then on his own, made a huge splash in the UK with a series [...]

When one stops to think of exactly how many films in the last sixty-odd years have been made about World War II, it boggles the mind. An encyclopedia that listed each of them, alphabetically, would run thousands of pages, and would still need to be updated every month. Today, we will open that book and [...]

As we approach yet another cinematic Summer of Our Discontent, wherein we will be inclined to listen wearily to grown men discuss tent poles, receipts, and whether or not Catalog Model Number Five makes for an effective Captain Kirk, there is no small relief in knowing that, occasionally, we are granted a respite from these [...]