It recently came out that the story of James B. Donovan, a Brooklyn lawyer who negotiated the release of American spy plane pilot Gary Francis Powers from the Soviet Union in 1960, was almost made into a 1965 movie starring Gregory Peck as Donovan. That would have made perfect sense—the role is about as morally […]
Embarrassingly, the first Tab Hunter film I ever saw was Grease 2 (1982). He played the hunky biology teacher opposite his longtime costar Connie Stevens. It wasn’t until many years later when I saw him in John Waters’s Polyester (1981), and even then I didn’t really understand his pop cultural significance. The documentary Tab Hunter […]
Writer, producer, and director Michael Almereyda is one of the more exciting filmmakers working today. He is interested in serious, intellectual themes, adapting Shakespeare in Cymbeline earlier this year or dramatizing the life and work of famed social scientist Stanley Milgram in his latest film, Experimenter. Yet Almereyda is not so much paying homage to […]
Gimmicks and tricks have been around since the birth of cinema, whether it be Cinemascope, 3-D, or Smell-o-Vision (thank you, John Waters). The ones that stood the test of time generally enhance the overall cinematic experience. Others, such as the Dogme 95 movement and, please God, found footage films, fade into the collective memory of […]
The makers of The Final Girls pull of an admirable trick. They present a credible, genial spoof of 1980’s slasher flicks while successfully incorporating a sentimental yet credible theme of appreciating and letting go of grief. It’s impressive and gives the movie more heft than most of the joke-a-minute spoofs that, say, the Wayans brothers […]
There’s a sequence in the narco thriller Sicario where we’re just watching characters driving. More specifically, it’s protagonist Kate (Emily Blunt) in a big black SUV in the midst of other big black SUVs and Mexican police patrol cars barreling through Juarez, Mexico. They’re transporting a criminal kingpin who’s part of a Mexican drug cartel. […]
Poker is not a glamorous pursuit, and poker table lifers, like Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn), are not hotshot forces of nature. The realities of poker, grinding it out hand after hand for upwards of 10 hours at a time, inevitably hitting bad luck after doing everything the right way, are far different than the adrenaline-fueled, million […]
One of the most pessimistic, yet accurate, onscreen portrayals of modern life in quite some time, writer/director Yury Bykov’s The Fool is the best kind of morality tale, because it all but denies the very existence of morality. In the Russian town where the film transpires, it has become exceedingly rare to have a shred […]
Pawn Sacrifice is a love story unlike any other, as it is a love between a man, chess genius Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire), and silence. Chess played at the grandmaster level requires stretching the human mind to its outermost limits, as matches have to be exhaustively prepared for, and there are more potential moves and […]