In 1988’s Bull Durham, Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) famously said that “fastballs are boring, and besides that, they’re fascist.” Well, that’s how I feel about Top Ten Movies of 2012 lists. It is that time of year in when critics of every stripe release their own personal Best Of lists. Not me. It is presumptive…
Promised Land, the new environmental drama from eco-buddies Matt Damon and John Krasinski, tries really hard to be an important film – and that is precisely why it fails. This is a message movie: its only reason to exist is to educate the public about the environmental dangers of natural gas extraction. But in these…
Well, it had to happen. Time relentlessly marches on, and now it is officially awards season again. The critics’ boards are making their choices, Top 10 lists are filling my Twitter feed, and we even have our first front-runner controversy. Of course, all of the awards are just appetizers for the Oscars (which will air…
Anna Karenina is the kind of movie that will inspire a lot of arguments, which is to say you will either love it or hate it. If you are wedded to the classical realism of the novel on which it is based, you will hate the leaps of imagination made by director Joe Wright that…
I am still trying to wrap my mind around this interview of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow by The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins. Here is an excerpt: The film includes wrenching scenes of a terrorist suspect being waterboarded and subjected to other forms of torture by C.I.A. operatives; the suspect eventually surrenders information that…
This morning, The Atlantic published an article I wrote as part of their online content. It is an analysis of the hypocrisies of the new film, Hyde Park on Hudson, in which I examine the ways the film claims to value the privacy of our elected leaders – while simultaneously exploiting that privacy to make…
There is an old rule in Hollywood: the dog has to live. You can kill hundreds of people in a movie and splatter the screen with human blood, and the audience won’t mind. But get one cute little pooch caught in the crossfire, and it will leave a bad taste in the viewer’s mouth (the…
French actress Marion Cotillard, who was a surprise Oscar-winner for her performance in La Vie En Rose, is receiving more awards buzz for Rust and Bone. It is the kind of role Oscar loves; she plays a whale trainer who has her legs bitten off, and the film details her rehab process which involves an…
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