Burn After Reading

With an enormous amount of good will, and even after reading the bad reviews, I went to see the latest Coen brothers movie because I am a fan. Or I used to be. I used to love them because they would come up with stuff so original, that even if it was too quirky for its own good, it was fresh…

NY Film Festival: Hunger

Hunger, a film by British visual artist Steve McQueen, and winner of this year’s Camera D’Or at Cannes, is probably…

Shoot the Piano Player

Yesterday night I needed a fix of beauty and lightness and French.
So there was Truffaut’s lovely little noir to do the trick.
Shoot the Piano Player is an adorable, quirky little film noir. Which is its greatest virtue. When has anybody described this genre as adorable and quirky? Shoot…

Appaloosa

I read a good review of this Western by Ed Harris and there I go, looking forward to see him and Viggo Mortensen (good guys) and Jeremy Irons (bad guy) duke it out in the Wild West. The movie is mildly entertaining, for the most part because Harris and Mortensen are great together. They are two sheriffs for…

NY Film Festival: I’m Going to Explode

We had a pretty good run with the first three movies we saw: The Class, Hunger and 24 City. These were films made by solid, talented, mature filmmakers. These are films that open your eyes to the world, that expand your horizons. Then came this appalling…

Gods of Cinema: Paul Newman

Not to be a contrarian but I don’t think Paul Newman was that great.
Before you start lobbying for my execution, let me explain. I admire his politics, I admire his social commitment and I think he was one of the handsomest men in the history of the world. As a movie star, yes…

NY Film Festival: Silent Light

Or, I beg to differ.

I see that Manohla Dargis and Anthony Lane, two critics I respect and admire, are both very taken by Silent Light, the movie by Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas. Reygadas is our auteur, our artiste, which means his movies are…

NY Film Festival: Tony Manero

This relentlessly dark film from Chilean director Pablo Larrain is tough going, but it is a very original, bitter film, with a very strong point of view. It takes place during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship, when Chile was under military law. The main character, a…

Reviews of Previews

Doubt
This preview is probably better than the movie. The movie, to judge from the preview, looks much better than the play, which I thought was a conventional piece in no way deserving of all the prizes, despite some terrific acting from Cherry Jones and Bryan F. O’Byrne. The preview of…

Righteous Kill

Not even a giant caliber hack like Jon Avnet doing his best to fuck it up, can take away the intermittent pleasure of watching the two giants of American acting, Pacino and De Niro together, even if they are old and wrinkled and one pines for their days of youthful, electric genius. Righteous Kills is…