I didn't want to mention this whole thing, and Vadim Rizov has already done a fine job of going over the history of Armond White's critical ad hominem attacks on Noah Baumbach movies here. Publicist Leslee Dart (who did not…
This is pretty much exactly what most new indie and studio movies look like to me. Not just the Oscar-hopefuls and the Sundance selections. And not just the trailers, but the entire movies themselves (which are usually laid out, beat…
What does Variety -- once known as "The Showbiz Bible" -- think it has to offer its readers? After Monday's news that the paper has jettisoned (what's the reverse of "ankled"? I forget...) veteran film critic Todd McCarthy, whose name…
In case you didn't know, the top five Muriel Awards for Best Picture of 2009 are: 1) Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" 2) Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" 3) Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox" 4) Joel & Ethan Coen's "A Serious…
I'm not particularly fond of the snatch-and-grab, shaky-cam style Kathryn Bigelow employs in "The Hurt Locker" -- or those fusillades of twitchy, punch-in and recoil zooms, either -- but I got past it pretty quickly. Unlike many other films in…
Here's the late, beloved Henry Gibson on my favorite sitcom, "The Dick Van Dyke Show," in 1966. (When I grow up, I still want to be Rob Petrie.) On "Laugh-In" (1968-1971), he was known for his recitations, which began with…
"Movie criticism of the elevated sort, as practiced over the past half-century by James Agee and Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, J. Hoberman and Dave Kehr... is an endangered species..." -- Richard Corliss, Film Comment, 1990 Good gracious,…
No modern director is more in love with the artifice of filmmaking than Martin Scorsese, or more overt in his expression of it. From the "drunk-cam" in "Mean Streets" (1973) to the self-consciously stylized performances in films like "Raging Bull"…
The Rube Goldberg contraption in this OK Go video for "This Too Shall Pass" is one of the best visual metaphors I've seen for the way a well-put-together movie works. If something misfires or doesn't go right, the cumulative payoff…
The prow of the ferry in the first couple shots of Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" isn't like any I've seen before. It raises up, like the visor on the headpiece of a suit of armor (or the crusher arm…
Great Movies