With The November Man, you quickly get the sense that you’re watching an uncredited Bourne sequel, with a few important improvements: An R rating, no shaky cam, and very few government functionaries spouting geopolitical buzzwords in front of monitors. Those are good improvements! It stars Pierce Brosnan doing sex stuff and spy stuff (an espionage […]
Film Review
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Sturm und Dad
Into the Storm: A movie that features fire tornadoes
There is a school of thought that all stories can be categorized into one of three conflicts: Man against Man, Man against Society, and Video Bloggers against Tornado. Into the Storm fits solidly into that last category. Hot widower Richard Armitage is the vice principal of a middle American high school for symmetrically featured 20-year-olds, […]
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Passing the Audition
Domination and power in Polanski’s Venus in Fur
Roman Polanski’s new film is set in a Paris theater, with a cast of two. Thomas (Mathieu Amalric) is wrapping up auditions for his new play when Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner) comes out of the rain. She’s coarse and slatternly—the exact opposite of what Thomas is looking for in his leading lady—but once she begins to […]
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Brain Dead
Lucy uses maybe five percent of its brain
Picture your college roommate Seth. You know, the incorrigible stoner who could spend hours waxing philosophic on the tiniest particles of the universe? And how each of these particles make up the very fabric of life? Hence the most powerful person in the world is basically the atomic twin of a fly alighting on a […]
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Stop Trying to Relate to Me
Zach Braff is an emotional terrorist who must be stopped
The definitive takedown of Zach Braff’s new movie has already been written: On the website Badass Digest, Devin Faraci wrote that Braff’s work is “aimed directly at the suburban lizard brains of slightly disaffected honkies who will never know true trouble, just the nagging sense that things should be easier for them than they already […]
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Mating Rituals of the Millennial
Abortion gets rom-comical in Obvious Child
Obvious Child will always be known, first and foremost, as “the abortion comedy.” That’s the pitch, the premise, and the novelty of writer/director Gillian Robespierre’s great new film: It’s about a young woman who has an abortion and doesn’t feel bad about it. In defiance of every film trope about abortion, which insist that soul-searching […]
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Live Every Week Like It’s Shark Week
Sharknado is exactly what it sounds like…TOTALLY AWESOME
Have you ever wished for a fictional natural disaster so deadly, so dangerous, so filled with sharp, toothy goodness that it strikes fear in the hearts of Galeophobes? Look no farther than Sharknado, a Syfy made-for-TV movie about a man, his estranged family, and a whole ocean full of bloodthirsty airborne sharks. While in the […]
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Spiritual Warriors
The making of a film that was never made
Dune is a boring book, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s movies are torturously indulgent. That’s my take, anyway, offered after multiple failed attempts to appreciate both Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel and Jodorowsky’s surrealist classics The Holy Mountain and El Topo. Your mileage out of these things certainly varies, just as your mileage with Jodorowsky’s Dune will […]
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I’ll Be Your Mirror
Getting under Scarlett Johansson’s skin
Much ado has been made about Anthony Lane’s recent skin-crawling New Yorker profile of Scarlett Johansson—a weird up-skirt shot of a character study that reads like a grad school application to Esquire. Ostensibly meant as a preview for her role in Jonathan Glazer’s remarkable new film Under the Skin, the 50-something Lane jizzes poetic over […]
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Good Ol’ Rummy
Donald Rumsfeld: Your friend and mine!
Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense for the half-decade that included September 11 and a couple of wars you might have heard of. But before that he was a Nixonian power player and NATO globetrotter. So it makes sense that Errol Morris would follow up his enormously powerful The Fog of War—which profiled another Cold […]