January 18, 2010: A Serious Man The tone of A Serious Man seemed immediately different from all the movies I had seen recently. A quiet late-1960s period film depicting life in the American mid-west, this is evidently the closest the Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan) have come to a true autobiographical work. While it isn’t […]
January 13, 2010: The Young Victoria I saw The Young Victoria during the lead-up to Oscar season, getting it out of the way because it seemed a likely nominee for costume design. I wasn’t mentally prepared to see it this night, but had fallen victim to the continuing box office success of Avatar and was […]
January 7, 2010: Invictus If it’s December, then it’s time for another Clint Eastwood movie. Unless he’s releasing two movies in the year, in which case you get one in November as well. I like to rib Eastwood a bit for his deliberate awards bait, but the reality is he’s an Oscar darling and for […]
January 7, 2010: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus I’ve always considered myself a fan of Terry Gilliam’s movies, although I have the impression that I haven’t seen many of them. However, when I start to go through the (non-Monty Python) list – Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), The Fisher King (1991), Twelve Monkeys (1995) – […]
January 6, 2010: The Messenger All I knew about The Messenger was that Woody Harrelson was in it, and there was awards buzz about his performance. At this time of the year, that’s all I need. I have enjoyed watching Harrelson since his early days on Cheers in the mid-1980s, and I respected his emphatic […]
January 5, 2010: (500) Days of Summer I was almost scared to see (500) Days of Summer, because it had reviewed fairly well and I like both Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and I’m a bit of a sucker for “consciously indie” films (Deschanel was also present the last time I rolled out that controversial […]
January 4, 2010: Elephant Elephant (2003) is a simple conceptual movie by Gus Van Sant, who remains among the few modern American directors who could still be described as an auteur and who regularly shuns convention in his filmmaking. From his early cult hit Drugstore Cowboy, he moved along to a mid-1990s blast of more […]
January 3, 2010: The Cove The Cove is a documentary which has received a fair bit of attention, about the annual dolphin slaughter in Japan which continues despite worldwide disapproval. Activists try to bring the horrors to light, and it is kept in the dark by fishermen on a small scale and governments on a […]
January 2, 2010: Precious I’m already afraid that if I look at this review six months from now, I’ll kick myself for being so light on this movie. I was extremely wary about seeing Precious because it sounded like exactly the kind of typical and manipulative and emotional heartstring-tugging story that people eat up, despite […]
December 31, 2009: Open Water I saw Open Water in the theatre, which puts me in quite the exclusive club. Was it necessary to see it there? Possibly not, but it generated a fair bit of critical buzz at the time and as an enthusiastic sometime scuba diver, I was interested. This is a simple […]