Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men , from a screenplay by Nicholas and Tod Griffin, based on the book by Eric Garcia, was a thoroughly absorbing hour and 56 minutes of entertainment. This was due largely to my not knowing a thing about these “matchstick men” before the screening, other than that they were a group of Read More
Heading into last week’s homestretch at the 28th Toronto International Film Festival, I began to realize, somewhere between The Best of Youth , a six-hour challenge about an embattled Italian family told against the unraveling social and political events of the last 40 years, and The Saddest Music in the World , one of an Read More
If anyone were to ask me at this moment to pick the best movie of the year, with all of December still to come, I would find myself torn between Spike Jonze’s Adaptation , from a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman, based on the book The Orchard Thief by Susan Orlean, and Pedro Read More
For pure silliness, Woody
Allen’s back in the driver’s seat with The
Curse of the Jade Scorpion , an affectionate wink at those noirish 1940′s
comedies in which a doofus like Bob Hope and a good-sport lady sidekick like
Dorothy Lamour are pursued by Nazis, Oriental gumshoes and Peter Lorre. In
period clothes and timeless Read More
Damon Santostefano’s Three to Tango , from a screenplay by Rodney Vaccaro and Aline Brosh McKenna, turns out to be one of the most pleasant surprises of this hectically overbooked season. Light comedies like this are especially vulnerable to the charge-which has been broadcast all over the Internet in this case-that they are not funny Read More
Brad Silberling’s City of Angels , from a screenplay by Dana Stevens, based on the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire (1987), strains to achieve the enchantingly sublime, but ends up sinking to the depressingly ridiculous. I must confess, however, that angels (with or without wings) in the movies have always made me nervous. Curiously, Read More
