“You either steal with a gun or a pen.”
Authorship in documentary filmmaking can be a tricky subject. It’s partly to do with the propriety of intellectual material; primarily, though, the ideal audience is willing and able to ascribe […]
Tag Archives: review
A Decade and a Half of Crazy Summers
Whenever a film depicts the lives of fictitious individuals against a noteworthy historical backdrop, the question must be raised: do the filmmakers use their characters to humanize an otherwise emotionally […]
Regarding the Other
Andrea Arnold’s Heathcliff is sort of a bastard. Not in the sense that nothing is known of his lineage — he’s just a downright selfish and obstinate bastard. Of course, […]
“What can I say? I like a winner.”
Todd Solondz has at this point firmly established himself as the preeminent chronicler of the rotten underbelly of suburbia. His characters are often vile, deplorable, riddled with insecurities; they tend […]
A Film Like Its Subject: Beautiful, Compelling, Confounding, and Incomplete
Brit Marling is a bright woman, and an admirable one as well. After graduating with an economics degree from Georgetown, she turned down a lucrative career at Goldman Sachs to […]
“He took the drink himself, I didn’t poison him.”
Lancaster Dodd and Freddie Quell, the protagonists of Paul Thomas Anderson’s exemplary film The Master, are not quite so different. Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix), while in the Navy, has developed an […]
Vital meets Viral: the Revolutionary Marketing of The Master
Paul Thomas Anderson is not a filmmaker who follows convention. After an impressive, yet little-seen debut feature (Hard Eight) and two sprawling masterpieces that saw the young auteur wed Scorsese’s […]
“You have to insist you’re right even if you know you’re wrong.”
This review was originally published 4 October 2007. Several references to relative dates have been updated to reflect this current posting. The 2000 Presidential election has special significance to me. […]
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“I am able to have sex with any beautiful woman I want just because I am so great.” In many ways — many more than are readily apparent — the […]
Considering Film 