Monday, March 5 2007
Running With Scissors (2006)
Director Ryan Murphy lacks the requisite wicked flair for black-comedy, the levity is mishandled, and completely at odds with the intensity of performance and direction.
Friday, October 27 2006
Running With Scissors (2006)
Augusten's narration of Running with Scissors starts with a question: "How do I begin to tell the story of how my mother left me and how I left her?"
Monday, January 30 2006
The Great Raid: The Director’s Cut (2003)
Archive shots of broken, diseased, and starved bodies provide a devastating illustration of the history that drives the film's fictions.
Friday, August 12 2005
The Great Raid (2003)
The relationship between heroism and villainy remains reductive, subjective, and devastatingly predictable.
Thursday, May 19 2005
William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (2004)
Pacino contains Shylock's temper as reaction, looking simultaneously vile and vulnerable, hardly a simple balance.
Friday, January 28 2005
William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (2004)
Jessica is alone, contemplative, and distressed.
Thursday, January 6 2005
William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (2004)
Pacino, noted lover of Shakespeare, strives for a multi-dimensional characterization of the angry Shylock, underlining his sadness and indignation.
Tuesday, December 28 2004
Luther (2003)
This is the type of movie you can imagine history teachers embracing, on account of the facile and accessible way it tackles the subject matter.
Thursday, July 10 2003
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)
During the story's awkward romantic interludes, children and their parents can squirm in boredom together, as a family.
Sunday, January 1 1995
Enemy at the Gates (2001)
This is Enemy at the Gates's most elegant theme, one that its often heavy-handed melodrama almost but not quite diminishes: that to be observed is to die, but to be invisible and quiet as the dead may allow you to survive.
