This review was originally published on June 16, 1995. “Smoke” is a beguiling film about words, secrets and tobacco. It takes place among lonely men and a few women who build a little world in the middle of a big city, a world based on sadness, secrets, killing time and enjoying a good smoke. Like […]
This review was originally published on August 29, 1997. “Gamera: Guardian of the Universe” is precisely the kind of movie that I enjoy, despite all rational reasoning. How, you may ask, can I possibly prefer this Japanese monster film about a jet-powered turtle to a megabudget solemnity like “Air Force One“? It has laughable acting, […]
This review was originally published on October 16, 1987. This movie is awake. I have seen so many films that were sleepwalking through the debris of old plots and second-hand ideas that it was a constant pleasure to watch “House of Games,” a movie about con men that succeeds not only in conning the audience, […]
This review was originally published on June 23, 2005. Miranda July‘s “Me and You and Everyone We Know” is a film that with quiet confidence creates a fragile magic. It’s a comedy about falling in love when, for you, love requires someone who speaks your rare emotional language. Yours is a language of whimsy and […]
This review was originally published on June 6, 2008. Jeff Nichols‘ “Shotgun Stories” is shaped and told like a revenge tragedy, but it offers an unexpected choice: The hero of the film does not believe the future is doomed by the past. If it were, most of the key characters would be dead by the […]
This review was originally published on January 7, 2000. “Magnolia” is operatic in its ambition, a great, joyous leap into melodrama and coincidence, with ragged emotions, crimes and punishments, deathbed scenes, romantic dreams, generational turmoil and celestial intervention, all scored to insistent music. It is not a timid film. Paul Thomas Anderson here joins Spike […]
This review was originally published on March 14, 1997. “Love Jones” is a love story set in the world of Chicago’s middle-class black artists and professionals–which is to say, it shows a world more unfamiliar to moviegoers than the far side of the moon. It is also frankly romantic and erotic and smart. This is […]
It’s better than similar micro-budget horror flicks, in large part because it never takes itself seriously.
A thoroughly fascinating documentary about a family discovering the depth and complexity of their patriarch while coming to terms with his flaws.
