Features
Friday, January 5 2007
Dreaming Out Loud: Robert Altman at the IFC Center
Robert Altman's films often reveal in dreams the strangeness of being alive. This more than anything sums up the timeless greatness of Altman at his best, and starts to convey what’s lost when cinema is thought of as commodity rather than art.
Monday, March 6 2006
May Angels Sing Thee Back to Mayberry: Don Knotts (1924-2006)
Knotts' characters would typically fail, but never so as to precipitate catastrophe; he would bumble, but he carried within him a certain virtuosity, which would come out when the story needed it.
Thursday, November 10 2005
Benji the Inscrutable
Benji is a child's movie, complete with stereotyped characters, cheesy jokes, and goofy kid-pleasing pratfalls that make parents cringe. But its quiet moments verge sometimes, improbably, on the sublime.
Monday, October 4 2004
The Silent Future
sterile and foreboding. Here, the modern worker goes home to a planned suburb of wide, empty sidewalks, landscaping devoid of birdsong, the soft blue glow of television sets pulsing through silent windows.
Friday, May 7 2004
Godzilla vs. Godzilla
We have become dazzled with the illusion and the high-tech gadgetry that makes the monster move. As we gaze at Godzilla, this splendid embodiment of our modern might, we forget who he really is -- and we forget what we are proven capable of becoming, ourselves.
Columns
Friday, May 9 2008
Godzilla: The Biggest Blockbuster
This summer's blockbusters got nothin' over the biggest, beastiest blockbuster of all...
Reviews
Wednesday, April 11 2012
Graceful Grief: 'Nicole Kidman 4-Film Collection'
If, after taking in Cold Mountain, you’re not yet sick of watching Kidman wield enormous shotguns, she does this plenty more in The Others, where she plays -- you’ll never guess -- a woman trying to hold a household together as she awaits a lover who may or may not be returning from war.
Tuesday, February 7 2012
'Doomsday Preppers': Planning for the End of Times
If you’re a statistically average person, what are your chances of following these people’s lead and successfully preparing for social collapse? Well, pretty long, unless you have quite a few acres of land lying fallow in the country and a couple hundred thousand extra dollars.
Wednesday, January 11 2012
'Are You There, Chelsea?' Is Missing... Chelsea Handler
Actually showing Chelsea shitfaced probably struck the producers as dropping at least one too many umbrellas into the piña colada of bad taste, so they demurred.
Wednesday, August 6 2008
WarGames: The Dead Code
This movie has that meandering, free-associative sense of dread familiar to us from watching the real-life fiasco of the last few years.
Friday, March 2 2007
Idiocracy (2006)
A brilliantly conceived, but fitfully executed comedy about how bad things are likely to get if we keep going where we're going.
