Butler Didn’t Do It
Apparently, if I'm not a boorish, knuckle-dragging, beer-swilling slob who grabs the asses of attractive women when they pass by, then I must be...
Skin I Live In: Hide and Sick
OK, here’s one of the more messed-up things I’ve seen in a while, and I mean that mostly in a good way. Much of...
High 90s
"Do you ever feel like a fuck-up?" So inquires recent high-school grad Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) of his psychiatrist, Dr. Jeffrey Squires (Ben Kingsley).
It's...
Need a Lift?
The Sundance Film Festival may be known for earnest, small-scale dramas, but it also has been the launching pad for some brutally simple low-budget...
Playing the Heavy
Fat men sometimes serve as tragic figures in movies. Notorious is a tragedy, but the main character's fatness isn't what marks him for doom...
Stark Failure
Between the dimming of the lights and the opening credits, something happened when I saw the new film version of All the King’s Men....
We’ll Take Manhattan
Reading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel Watchmen today, it's striking how this 1985 masterpiece has penetrated to the marrow of countless movies,...
Popcorn and Kimchee
With 30 screens to fill each week, the folks at AMC Grapevine Mills occasionally fill out their bill with obscure entries from the ranks...
The Moore We See …
Movies about very rich, very unhappy families - genre classics such as Ordinary People and Sidney Lumet's version of Long Day's Journey into Night...
Cowardly Custard
Wildly popular in their own time, Noël Coward's stage comedies fell from favor in the 1960s and have been struggling ever since. His pieces...
