“It’s not easy to lead an honest life.”
“I don’t know if I’m an alcoholic, really,” Kate Hannah says at her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, “I just drink. I drink a lot. And I’ve always drank a lot, […]
Tag Archives: criticism
When Life Gives You Nerve Gas…
Pete and Emma Mandrake’s couples’ brunches seem like a disaster waiting to happen. The men are largely disinterested, focused instead on the score of the UT game and bidding on […]
Good Ol’ Boys
There’s a school of filmmaking which maintains that the director’s job is simply to hire good actors to perform a good script and then get out of the way. While […]
“We’ve all got stuff in our past that wasn’t too clever.”
Expanding upon his usual theme of deception among the British upper class, Julian Fellowes’s directorial debut Separate Lies is a film with enough intelligence and insight to make up for […]
Time Isn’t On Their Side
Not Fade Away, David Chase’s affectionate epistle to the sixties, opens not with its own protagonists but with a dramatization of the meeting of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Filmed […]
“The stars are on fire and God is very busy.”
The 1970s are a hotbed for dramas of suburban unrest. The 1950s were too repressed and the 1960s were too unhinged, but in American cinema, the ’70s have come to […]
How Many Wrongs Make a Right?
It is difficult to ascertain to what, exactly, the title of Quentin Dupieux’s latest film refers. Almost every moment of Wrong defies the logic of narrative filmmaking; every scene is, […]
“You’re all pants and no trousers!”
Though A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is only his second film as writer/director, Roman Coppola has already established a pretty specific MO. Pendulous vacillation between emotional […]
“If you haven’t seen it, please do.”
“If you haven’t seen it, please do.” –Richard Dawkins, parenthetically discussing Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life in his book The God Delusion. If Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life […]
Caveat Emptor
Matthew McConaughey has been on something of a winning streak for the past year or so, with strong supporting work in Bernie, The Paperboy, and Magic Mike. Apparently deciding all […]
Considering Film 