Two weeks prior to its release, I wrote a review of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. My pre-release review was equal parts contempt and resignation, swirled around with a jigger of blogger’s snarkiness. It was a sophomoric stunt, to be sure, but one with a point… that this is a movie […]

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Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull is like that awkward drink you have with your ex-girlfriend years later. You smile, but your heart isn’t really in it. After it’s all over, you know it was a bad idea, and you’ll be happier when it’s all forgotten.

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Here’s a new maxim for Young Hollywood… Friends don’t let Friends direct friends’ screenplays.
Working with your longtime friends, though, is a much better idea. Simon Pegg, the star of Run Fatboy Run, is an English comic actor and cult film hero. Working with longtime collaborators Nick Frost and Edgar Wright, he has starred in a […]

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Be Kind, Rewind is the cinematic equivalent of a letter to Santa Claus. It’s an extended, naïve fantasia; brimming over with good-natured longing but it’s also as insubstantial as that North Pole address.
The film is centered around a ramshackle video store in Passaic, New Jersey – ostensibly the birthplace of jazz great Fats […]

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This movie is so vanilla,
it turned Samuel L. Jackson’s hair white.

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Just released on DVD is one of the most interesting and unsung films of 2007 – Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone. Originally a novel by Dennis Lehane – the author behind Clint Eastwood’s unreasonably grim Mystic River – it’s standard fare pulp fiction that’s elevated by thoughtful and nuanced direction and a full complement of […]

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If hope, as Emily Dickinson wrote “is the thing with feathers”, then hype is the two hundred foot tall scaly sea-monster with an appetite for concrete, perched in midtown Manhattan and singing a song of destruction.

It started with a trailer last summer, too cool to even have a name on it. Then months of […]

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In Chinatown, the malignant Noah Cross remarks that “politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” He could have easily added filmmakers to that list. Hollywood is as brutal a business as any on the planet. It’s also fond of snubbing great works, and showering accolades upon lesser contributions […]

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