Screen
Will the real Bond please stand up?
There’s no more iconic spy in Western culture than 007, Bond, James Bond, and with a 50-year cinematic history, the 22 previous films in the franchise also represent an extraordinary body of cinematic work. The character of suave but deadly Bond has been played by a ...
Partly sunny
To steal from Mother Goose (don’t worry, she’s dead): When Cloud Atlas is good, it’s very, very good; when it’s bad, Hugo Weaving is doing a drag impression of Nurse Ratched. The ambition of writers/directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Twyker, working from David...
No-town music
At its worst, cinema verite is aimless pretense masquerading as artistic intent. At its best, it is Detropia, a documentary that adds soul to statistics, going inside the implosion of a once-proud city using a sprawling, haunting approach. That isn’t to say that ...
Take the psycho path
With massive mainstream media marketing rollouts and the box office boons reaped by free social media, movies so rarely surprise us these days. Shock cameos are spoiled in the space of a tweet, while most trailers render buying the proverbial “movie cow” moot when ...
Being near Emma Watson
Reconciling the public’s fascination with Emma Watson’s blossoming sexuality with realizing that the first time she was on screen she was 11 years old is really difficult. Doing so in a movie where her character’s sexuality is fundamentally warped because of an ...
Comedians sleep standing up
A note for the admittedly small subset of folks who swoon at the storytelling magic of This American Life and tingle at the mere mention of Ira Glass’s name: Sleepwalk with Me is charming public radio entertainment channeled into cinemas. Watch out Hollywood ...
Object of my Affleck-tion
It’s easy to thrill people when they don’t know what’s coming. OK, maybe not easy — paging Mr. Shyamalan — but certainly less difficult than whipping up tension in a film based on a decades-old actual incident, the resolution of which is but a Google search away. ...
Margarine-al humor
In the wake a presidential debate that was almost fact-free on one side and nearly lifeless on the other, smearing Butter on one´s eyes seemed like a good option for poll junkies. This allegedly politically charged ensemble comedy promised a send-up of campaign ...