According to the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the New York Film Critics Circle, the two best films of 2010 are David Fincher's "The Social Network" and Olivier Assayas's "Carlos." I've no quarrel with that. In fact, those two…
In the new issue of American Cinematographer, Darren Aronofsky (whose film "Black Swan" is heavy on close-ups) is quoted saying: We used a lot of close-ups. For me, the close-up is one of the great inventions of the 20th century;…
"Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer" is a kind of whodunnit. Spitzer makes formidable enemies in his rise to power as New York Attorney General, stepping in to police Wall Street when the feds refused, and we…
"it's easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world." -- Stuart Smalley My Theory of Everything (regarding human behavior) centers on our species' poor understanding of risk assessment and management.* Which is probably why I found this…
Australian film critic Adrian Martin has sparked a discussion about the term "realism" with a short piece he wrote for the Dutch publication "Filmkrant," titled "Make Me Feel Mighty Real." Martin contends that the critical success of David Fincher's "Zodiac"…
Ever since David Thomson's "A Biographical Dictionary of Film" was published in 1975, browsers have said that they love to hate Thomson's contrarian arguments -- against John Ford or Frank Capra, Coppola or Kubrick, for example.¹ Fans and critics can…
I was just reading David Thomson's intriguing/perplexing entry on Paul Thomas Anderson in the new edition of his "Biographical Dictionary of Film" (more about that later) and he begins with reports that Anderson had at one point been unhappy with…
I was hit with a heckuva headcold last weekend and I feel like Steve Buscemi at the end of "Fargo." If only I could get my head out of this woodchipper. I've been making notes and trying to watch some…
My recent post called "Framed" triggered memories of one the most evocatively titled books about cinema: Leo Braudy's "The World in a Frame." (What does it evoke? See quote from Martin Scorsese in upper right corner.) Published in 1976, the…
Frustrated with the constraints of watching films as a critic, the strange new world of publishing in HTML, and the diminishing returns of the movies themselves, critic Duncan Shepherd of the San Diego Reader, after 38 years, says "So Long":…
Great Movies