Once upon a time, Oliver Stone enjoyed a reputation as the most paranoid man in Hollywood, seeing conspiracy theories under every rock and questioning the official explanations. So when Stone decided, earlier this year, to tackle the subject of our current president, who is responsible for any number of actual conspiracies to take away civil liberties and then cover up his own responsibility for same, I got a little giddy. This is, after all, the... [continue]

In the movie Lakeview Terrace, released two weeks ago, Samuel L. Jackson is told by a neighbor that at least housing prices should continue to rise. That line of dialogue, innocuous enough when written, instantly places the movie as a relic of the hazily-remembered golden days of last summer, when subprime mortgages and those who securitized them saw no end in sight. Body of Lies is equally ill-served by the time-lag involved in movie production.... [continue]

Films: The Sun Also Rises, Son of Rambow Future Screenings: Son of Rambow - Sat, 4/12/08, 2:30 PM at the Bridge The Sun Also Rises - None I've been grumpier than usual at this festival, giving a lot of low ratings to movies that people seem to like, tripping homely orphans with my cane, and so forth. I think it must be a peril of media overindulgence: nothing makes it harder to get into a... [continue]

Films: Fata Morgana Future Screening: Fata Morgana - Sat, 4/12/08, 12:15 PM at the Ritz East Theater 1 It's too late to write up a formal festival diary thing about it, but I wanted to give some love to Roman de Gare, a comedy/mystery from long-time French director Claude Lelouch that is clever and fun even though it doesn't entirely hang together well. (Festival rating: Very Good.) It was the best of a slow week;... [continue]

Films: Like A Shooting Star, Stuck, The Edge of Heaven Future Screenings: There are no future screenings for any of the three films. Most of the time I lead the free and easy lifestyle of a law student preparing for the bar exam (in July), but then the film festival rolls around and my life suddenly gets stressful. It’s hard to get together with friends, at least with those who aren’t willing to meet for... [continue]

“Shit, I could write that,” said a woman at the Bridge on Monday, when told that Juno was about a teenage pregnancy. Thing is, dear reader, so could you. Not because you found yourself trying to buy a ticket for three to your junior prom, mind; but neither Juno nor this summer’s Knocked Up stray too far from the basic emotional territory set out in Nine Months, Father of the Bride Part II, and the... [continue]

(This movie has already been out for over a week, obviously. However, when I saw it last Friday I felt compelled to write about it—it's been a long time since I saw a movie that stayed with me for this long. If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, by all means do so ASAP.) It must be something in the water. Filmmakers have rediscovered the mythology of the American frontier, and that...... [continue]

Love in the Time of Cholera is a good example of a bad adaptation. Garcia Marquez fans realize, I hope, that the man’s strengths don’t easily translate to film, so you shouldn’t be shocked to learn that the film Love in the Time of Cholera feels more like an adaptation of a GGM-inspired Saturday morning cartoon than of the novel itself. Cholera the film is a fairly ordinary Hollywood period piece; it’s the sort of...... [continue]

Michael Clayton is a wonderful example of learning to walk before you can crawl. Tony Gilroy, as a writer/director, evinces an offhand sense of authenticity and cool intelligence that has served the Bourne franchise well. It feels very much like the sort of old-Hollywood adult entertainment that, according to cranky movie critics (like, um, me), They Just Don’t Make Anymore. The title character, played by George Clooney, is a complex mixture of nobility, cynicism, and... [continue]

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford begins with the last train robbery Jesse and Frank James did together, and already you can tell the lengths to which writer/director Andrew Dominik and his DP Roger Deakins have gone to create a new cinematic language for the Western. The night is pitch-black, and the light of the train shines through a late-autumn forest as if God himself were onboard. The inside of the... [continue]

(This review contains spoilers; although if you think the movie can be spoiled I admire your optimism.) The Brave One is about Erica (Jodie Foster), a middle-aged New York City native who wanders the streets of the city for work (she records the sounds of the city for her NPR-style radio show). She manages to go for four decades or so without being the victim of any violent encounter to speak of, before one fateful... [continue]

Tom Knox is the frontrunner in the 2007 Democratic primary and, according to the most recent Keystone poll, the one with the momentum behind him. But like so many other things about him, Knox’s accomplishment is less impressive than it first appears. Relying on nothing more than a wealth of contacts in city and state government, a nationally known campaign team (his media guru was profiled in The New Republic, under the headline “Joe Trippi... [continue]

Film: I Don't Want To Sleep Alone Future Screening: There are no future screenings scheduled. One of the things I enjoy about the film festival is the number of people who show up for even the most difficult films. Tsai Ming-liang is by no means an accessible or populist director—if you read my review and think, that sounds really boring, you're probably right—and yet the theater was almost entirely full of people. I'd be surprised... [continue]

Films: Day Night Day Night; The Boss of It All Future Screenings: Day Night Day Night: April 10, Ritz East 2 at 2:15PM The Boss of It All: No future screenings scheduled The initial festival excitement is beginning to wear off, as it usually does. Exhaustion is starting to set in, and today I had my first bad movie experiences of this year’s festival. That was bound to happen but it still deflates my enthusiasm... [continue]

Films: Paprika, 12:08 East of Bucharest Future Screenings: Paprika, April 8, Prince at 9:45PM 12:08 East of Bucharest, April 8, Ritz Five at 9:30PM Stop me if you've heard this one before: "It's just a movie; you're not supposed to think about it. If I wanted to think, I'd read a book." Movies, in the popular conception, are either mindless entertainment or the sort of medicinal experience you wouldn't voluntarily seek out. Well, let me... [continue]

Movie: Invisible Waves Future Screening: Sunday, April 8, 7:30 PM, Ritz East 1 I see a fair number of pretentious, art-house movies at the festival every year (see, for example, Invisible Waves), and I’m continually amused by the variety of euphemisms that festival programmers and blurb-writers employ when they essentially mean either “slow,” “boring,” or both. However, I assume that some of you may be festival neophytes who, for whatever reason, are not exactly sitting... [continue]

Since the success of The Passion of the Christ, studio execs have worked overtime to figure out how to get evangelical money back to Hollywood where it belongs. You could see it in sub rosa marketing campaigns for any number of Hollywood movies: Aslan was Jesus. Superman was Jesus. Even King Kong was briefly Jesus. Then some smart Harvard grad thought to himself that perhaps Jesus would make an appealing Jesus, and thus The Nativity... [continue]

Mutual Appreciation, which opens today at Ritz at the Bourse, is only the second film by director Andrew Bujalski, but among certain segments of highbrow cinephilia he's already considered to be a rock star. His interests aren't particularly novel--any number of directors, particularly in the orbit of the Sundance Film Festival, have attempted to speak to the lives of self-conscious twentyish urbanites--but Bujalski has won a reputation with what one critic called his "careful attention... [continue]

There is a Congressman who has gained no small notoriety in the past year. The NRA has given his voting record an A+, NARAL an F. The left-leaning Committee for Reform and Ethics in Washington called him “one of the most unethical members in Congress.” Perhaps that’s why he raised more money from lobbyists than almost any other candidate for the House of Representatives; why he consistently opposes lobbying reform and disclosure requirements; why he...... [continue]

Kelly Reichardt, whose new film Old Joy opens today at Ritz at the Bourse, is one of America's most under-appreciated directors. In large part, this is because she eschews a lot of the tricks that Indiewood directors use to get attention from audiences. Her style is unadorned but quietly effective; it works on your emotions even without you realizing it. Her debut, the 1994 film River of Grass, uses this to great effect. It's... [continue]