I just wanted to alert everyone to a review I’ve posted at DVD Times of Public Enemies. I’m eager to call it the best film of the year thus far, though take my opinion with the knowledge that I also completely love Michael Mann’s previous film Miami Vice. Ultimately, better men than me will have [...]

The American Old West has been mythologized to excess, especially the less-than-noble bandit criminals. Jesse James, then, would be the prince of these men, too often wrongly characterized as Robin Hood-like figures who were merely setting things “right.” James was popular enough to inspire numerous film versions in Hollywood’s classic period, including stabs by three [...]

Admittedly, this is not a traditional review at all. I saw Michael Clayton a couple of weeks ago, in a small theater on an otherwise uninteresting day. I was anxious to watch it, based on positive reviews, George Clooney’s usual dramatic competence, and writer/director Tony Gilroy’s impressive screenwriting work on the Bourne films. [...]

The paths taken by Hollywood films this year have caused even my half-charcoal heart to skip a few beats. I usually relish a trip to the seediest parts of tinseltown, but 2007 has been unrelenting in its explorations of evil. This isn’t about the foolish “torture porn” that’s swept in and out of [...]

Sometimes I can understand how films polarize movie fans (the work of Quentin Tarantino) and sometimes I can’t (Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, for example). Right now, with his new film The Darjeeling Limited just opening the New York Film Festival, Wes Anderson seems to be an auteur under fire, though more of the [...]

Note: This discussion will contain spoilers for the films featuring Matt Damon as amnesiac CIA assassin Jason Bourne, specifically the most recent installment The Bourne Ultimatum.
With the release of The Bourne Ultimatum, it appears that the final chapter in the movie life of Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne has been written. Outstanding box office grosses may [...]

Movies that depict the Hollywood version of war rarely interest me. When I learned Clint Eastwood was making a war film called Flags of Our Fathers, I expected the possibility of brutal violence packaged in an updated version of standard Hollywood fare. The trailer looked like more of the same - a rousing spectacle full [...]

Claude Chabrol’s The Bridesmaid (La Demoiselle d’honneur), from 2004, is a strong entry in the prolific French director’s filmography.  Dubbed his country’s master of suspense and compared to that other heavyset director by virtually every lazy writer in the English language, Chabrol has been carving out his own niche since the onset of the French [...]

Just when I’m ready to dismiss Michael Haneke as a talented trickster more interested in making movies for himself than audiences, I reluctantly give him a second chance and I end up emotionally floored. His 2001 film The Piano Teacher, or La Pianiste, based on the novel by Elfriede Jelinek, is a devastating psychological [...]

Some films make us feel uncomfortable and troubled not only as we watch them, but for days afterward. It’s often easy to dismiss these films as not being your cup of tea, but there must be something extraordinary about them when it becomes impossible to forget what you’ve seen. One such recent film that stands [...]