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El Orfanato, a.k.a. The Orphanage, had me all frisson -ed even before the credits rolled (”one, two, three, knock on the wall” has got to be the creepiest kid’s game ever). It’s a pull-out-all-the-stops haunted house story that reminded me obliquely of The Others*, and two of the most frightening pieces of fiction I’ve read […]

I’m really glad I saw Control in a theatre, mostly because of Martin Ruhe’s stunning black & white cinematography. In fact, it was perhaps a little too stunning. One of the film’s opening shots, in which a young Ian Curtis (Sam Riley) slouches across the length of a grim, soulless apartment building, got me thinking […]

I don’t have enough to say about Art School Confidential to write a real review of it. There were some things about it that I liked a lot, some things that I hated quite a bit, and I liked it much better while I was watching it than I did after I thought about it […]

I saw It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time in 1997. It was extremely different from what I’d been led to expect. I wrote an essay/review of it then that seems more than a bit reactionary to me now.
The week before Christmas, I saw the film for the second time at a Brattle Theatre […]

I’m not a big fan of movies that rely on “twist” endings. I think the value of surprise as an artistic technique is easily overrated. If it’s not a good movie if you know the ending, it’s just not a good movie, period.
But on the other hand, it can be really rewarding to see a […]

Considerable blather I wanna inflict on y’all, but a paucity of typing time. Mebbe over the weekend, although it looks to be a busy one.
In the meantime, quickly: we watched Team America: World Police. I had extremely mixed feelings about it, mostly because while it certainly was a parody of jingoist warmongering action flicks, I’m […]

(it’s not the elysian fields or a photograph, either)

the minutemen ruled, and now the minutemen movie rules