Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is remarkable in how it mixes the personal with the political, the minute with the grand. The plot itself is obsessively focused on one self-made man’s fall due to his own insatiable greed, but in the corners of that narrow focus, we see nothing less than the history of America.
Continue Reading Add comment January 28th, 2008
Perhaps the most surprising achievement of Tim Burton’s latest film, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, is that you can’t help taking it very seriously. Even the film’s advertising seems to be winking - it’s hard to believe that there’s an affecting tragedy to be had in a movie billed as a “bloody tale of music, murder, melodrama, meat pies, and one man’s desperate for revenge”…
Continue Reading Add comment January 6th, 2008
Joe Wright’s film Atonement is an epic tale of romance during the earth-shattering cataclysm of World War II. Why, then, does it feel so lightweight?
Continue Reading Add comment January 6th, 2008
Redacted:
I’m Not There: 
How do you represent the cinematically unrepresentable?
Continue Reading Add comment December 19th, 2007
Control: 
24 Hour Party People:
Ian Curtis was a young man who loved David Bowie and the Sex Pistols, sang for the Manchester band Joy Division, struggled with epilepsy, cheated on his wife, and killed himself. I describe him in this matter of fact way because that is essentially how we see him in Anton Corbjin’s biopic Control.
Continue Reading 1 comment December 4th, 2007
The purportedly radical message of Ridley Scott’s American Gangster has to do with relative morality. The rise of real-life drug dealer Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) to the top of the Harlem drug world is very much like the rise of any successful legal businessman…
Continue Reading Add comment November 25th, 2007
SPOILERS THROUGHOUT
“Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” - Proverbs 16:18
Continue Reading Add comment November 24th, 2007
There is only one scene with music in Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest film, No Country for Old Men. A mariachi band begins to serenade a man sleeping on a stairway in dusty Mexican town…
Continue Reading Add comment November 18th, 2007
Carter Burwell’s score for Sidney Lumet’s new film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, has an unmistakable resemblance to his previous score for Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo with its mournful strings, and that’s not all that the two films have in common…
Continue Reading Add comment November 8th, 2007
Has Sean Penn made the Republican film of the year?
Continue Reading Add comment October 31st, 2007