Late at night, alone in the woods, a group of film students at work on a no-budget horror film called The Death of Death are interrupted by — the death of death. Reports of animated corpses feeding on human flesh come over the radio and are met with nervous skepticism;…
The exemplary achievements of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival succeeded by two means: either narrowing the gap between author and subject in pursuit of intimate effects, or else working distance into the material and profiting from the vantage. Contemporary neorealism at its most confident and alert, Chop Shop finds…
Huffing and puffing to resuscitate a long-moribund genre, James Mangold manages to imbue a 50-year-old Western with the semblance of life. Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma isn’t as startling a resurrection job as his Johnny Cash biopic, but it does send a saddlebag full of Western tropes skittering into…
There have already been critical rumblings about the extreme violence in Shoot ‘Em Up, but it’s hard to get too worked up about a film whose very title announces its maker’s intent and which opens by raking the New Line Cinema corporate logo with machine gun fire (a gesture long…
1. Balls of Fury is a movie about: a. A former table tennis prodigy (Dan Fogler as Randy Daytona) enlisted by the FBI to infiltrate the underground ping-pong tournament of a legendary Chinese criminal (Christopher Walken). b. Suppository jokes. c. Little worth discussing and even less worth seeing. d. All…
The Office: Season Three (Universal)After a shaky first season and a better-with-every-episode second, The Office proved itself one of the most consistent comedies in the history of the medium. The show has long since escaped the shadow of its BBC forebear and boasts an ensemble from which you could pick…
Sundance signals, for better or worse, the state of American independent filmmaking. Cannes keeps faith, for those who still believe, with the cinema d’auteur. And Toronto? The largest and most important film festival in North America seems to do nearly as many things as there are movies to see—349 in…
It’s pretty much a toss-up which I love more: gorging on cinema or getting up at noon. And so, on the first day of the Toronto International Film Festival, in lieu of contemplating Bela Tarr’s The Man from London, I lingered in my pajamas anticipating Delta Chelsea’s The Breakfast from…
Year of the Dog (Paramount Vantage) It’s just about the First Commandment of Hollywood: Don’t kill the dog. So it’s a testament to the clout of writer-director Mike White (School of Rock) that killing off the dog is the first of many rules broken in this weird-ass movie. Folks fooled…
This is a mockumentary, right?” I’ve been asked that question at least a dozen times since The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters made its bow at the Slamdance Film Festival in January. Quite simply, some folks just don’t believe that Seth Gordon’s film about two men vying for…
A quiz: 1. Balls of Fury is a movie about: a. A former table tennis prodigy (Dan Fogler as Randy Daytona) enlisted by the FBI to infiltrate the underground Ping-Pong tournament of a legendary Chinese criminal (Christopher Walken). b. Suppository jokes. c. Little worth discussing and even less worth seeing…
The Lives of Others(Sony) Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film, easily the best of last year, exists on many levels: as tragedy, dark comedy and love story—not between a man and a woman, but between two seemingly opposite men bound by the same damnation. On the one hand is Georg Dreyman…
Back in 1995, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise gave flesh to a Yank’s fantasy of worldly European womanhood: Julie Delpy’s Celine, a sprite who materialized on a passenger train for one sweet Viennese night of courtship and flirtation, as if willed from the fevered dreams above a thousand hostel beds. As…
Resurrecting the Champ is a great movie about journalism—maybe the best there ever was—because Resurrecting the Champ is mind-erasingly boring. It’s a solid story about the newspaper business—specifically, about how a well-intentioned writer occasionally makes a mistake totally by accident, a mistake that is pretty much victimless and easily fixable…
Shortly after graduating from film school, I took a part-time job as the assistant to a successful movie and television director who told me I’d be handling a mix of personal and professional responsibilities. Not long after, I was put to work maintaining the good humor of the tenants at…
Leonardo DiCaprio wants you to know that we are in serious trouble. No amount of artful chin stubble, it seems, will reverse the depletion of fossil fuels or help to slow population growth. Not even three Oscar nominations will save you—without an actual statuette, there’s nothing to wedge under the…
Taxi Driver: Collector’s Edition (Sony) “Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads: Here is a man who would not take it anymore.” Martin Scorsese’s 1976 vision of hell as city-of-night New York rips through the reverential treatment on this special edition like a hunter’s blade through deerskin. A second disc of eight…
The latest comic meteorite to hurtle forth from the galaxy of producer Judd Apatow, Superbad is about a couple of chronically unpopular best friends who, after four years stuck on the lowest rung of the high-school social ladder, find themselves invited to a legitimately cool party. Goodbye, Friday nights chugging…
It seems fitting that a movie about debate competition should produce ambivalent feelings. As a master debater says early on in Jeffrey Blitz’s Rocket Science, a strong opinion is a luxury the great ones don’t allow themselves—it only gets in the way. What matters is being able to argue either…
Bubba Ho-tep Limited Edition (MGM) Intentional camp is difficult to do well. It’s a contradiction that usually comes off cutesy and forced. The old Batman series pulled it off, and it’s been B-movie god Bruce Campbell’s livelihood. But in a long career of overacting and mugging, Campbell’s peak may be…
Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled Iraq War into an enraging, apocalyptic litany of fuck-ups. One may have already heard some or all of the absurd, shameful, appalling details that Ferguson collects—the well-connected American kid plucked straight…
Stardust is less an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 1999 novel than of its dust-jacket synopsis. That will come as disconcerting news to fans of the author, who thus far has avoided the fate of fellow fantasy writers and comics creators who’ve had their works mangled by the studios’ clumsy assembly…
