Classical Gore
I’m always puzzled when my fellow film critics decry the notion of “style over substance” in movies.
Style trumps everything. Style is what distinguishes...
Cold Case
Sheesh, you make one splattery serial-killer flick that turns into a blockbuster hit, and everybody thinks they have you pegged.
It’s been a good...
Men With Choppers
Some years ago, political satirist Mark Russell observed that guys caught in mid-life crises tended to handle them in one of three ways: They...
Since My Baby Left Me
If Black Snake Moan is disappointing, that’s largely because it starts out with one of the greatest premises of any movie in recent years....
What’s the Big Idea?
George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to...
Pop Corn Movie
My job is difficult this week. I’m here to make a case for Music and Lyrics, a movie that well exceeded my nonexistent expectations.
My...
The Way to Wonderland
An unusual number of people have come up to me in the last month or so to tell me how marvelous they found Pan’s...
Violation
Anthony Minghella made his name as the director of lush, cosmopolitan, epic literary adaptations with period settings, beginning with The English Patient in 1996...
Sin for Your Supper
The title of The Last Sin Eater refers to a ritual that hails from the British Isles, in which a designated “sin eater” (a...
Army of Shadows
When Mat Hames was growing up in Grand Prairie, he managed to convince his mom one day that he’d been kidnapped. Not amused, she...
