Shutter Island was shuffled from an intended fall 2009 release date to February 2010, which changed the its profile from Oscar-season prestige picture to a late-winter thriller with low expectations (a studio delaying a film is often a sign of a lack of confidence), but it has proven to be a sound business decision; though [...]

“Even the music makes me want to kill myself,” said a man a few rows down from me during the closing credits. I laughed; sometimes someone just says it all.
But being depressing is only one of the problems with A Single Man, helmed by fashion designer-turned-director Tom Ford. Watching it, you can see that Ford [...]

What if you had a passion for doing something you were terrible at? Would you make it your life’s work regardless, or would you shove The Dream down under a pile of Get Real? Most people would do the latter. “When I grow up I want to…” says everybody, but hardly anybody actually grows up [...]

If you know even a little about the premise of Funny Games - you start dreading what you are going to witness from the first frame itself. This fact alone is a commentary on how violence, and the expectation of violence has seeped into our consciousness - almost to a point where we dread its [...]

There comes a moment in some movies after which it can do no wrong. In (500) Days of Summer, it’s a split-screen sequence that contrasts romantic hero Tom Hansen’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) heightened expectations for a party with the disappointing reality. It’s whimsical in its construction, but so sad in its effect. Like the rest of [...]

Terrence Malick’s The New World is, essentially, a story of wonder. The opening moments play almost like a climax as the Native Americans nervously and excitedly watch the English ships pulling into the shore, and the English lay eyes for the first time on what will eventually become the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia. The film [...]

Away We Go is a touching, funny, and nearly perfect comedy about a young couple expecting their first child and trying to sort out their place in the world. Unfortunately, it’s interrupted at frequent intervals by annoying cartoon comedy routines detailing the lives of families in the US and Canada, whom the main characters encounter [...]

Gangs of New York is in many ways Martin Scorsese’s most ambitious film but it is also his most undisciplined. This is an example of filmmaking gluttony, of an artist given leave to indulge himself to the extreme without being held back. In certain respects Scorsese’s attention to detail is admirable but this isn’t a [...]

The story of Apocalypse Now is one of almost inconceivable excess. Onscreen it is a behemoth of a film loaded with memorable sequence after memorable sequence, very nearly bursting at the seams with ideas. Off screen it was a staggering undertaking that nearly destroyed everyone involved. It’s too big a movie to be easily summed [...]

In the winter of 1998, I saw Dark City in the theater, and it threw open the doors of my imagination like no film before it and few films since. I was one of the few. Released to mixed reviews and a confused marketing campaign — the studio, New Line Cinema, didn’t know how to [...]