Jean-Luc Godard’s “Every Man For Himself” (1980) opens with an elegant pan across a cloudy blue sky accompanied by a melodic orchestral arrangement, sound and image in perfect harmony. Anyone familiar with Godard’s previous decade of work had to suspect…
Jean Renoir’s “A Day In The Country” (“Partie de campagne”, 1936) has its legion of devotees, finishing in the top 100 in the most recent “Sight & Sound” critics poll. While it is undeniably beautiful and sometimes downright breathtaking, I…
An old man prays for death so that he will no longer be a burden to his granddaughter. A swordsman dressed in black appears behind him and grants his request with a single brutal stroke. An avenging angel? Hardly. Ryunosuke…
I caught “My Winnipeg” (2007) at its debut screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. After the screening, the first question to director Guy Maddin was from a man who introduced himself as a former resident of Winnipeg. He was…
I’ve figured out by now that I simply have nothing useful to say about screwball comedies. I don’t like them. I have watched more than half of the supposed very best of the genre and I don’t find a single…
“Tooth Fairy 2” is the direct-to-video sequel to “Tooth Fairy” (2010), which starred Dwayne Johnson. And you have to give The Rock credit. He made sure he was busy when they decided to make “Tooth Fairy 2,” leaving Larry the…
After twenty years of trying I have resigned myself to the fact that I will never truly love any film described as a screwball comedy. My working hypothesis is that I am missing the apparently common-place gene that enables most…
I hadn’t forgotten how great “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (1974) is, but it sure is nice to be reminded every now and then. Absurdly prolific German dynamo Rainer Werner Fassbinder had a little down time in between films so,…
“All That Jazz” (1979) pits choreographer-director Bob Fosse’s razzle-dazzle vs. lead actor Roy Scheider’s serene confidence to create a movie musical like few others. Fosse, who also co-wrote the script along with Robert Alan Arthur, takes the autobiographical impulse as…
No wonder nobody likes skeptics. In 2004, an Arkansas man boating through the swamp spotted an ivory-billed woodpecker, a species thought to be extinct since the early part of the twentieth century. A fleeting glimpse of the majestic creature recorded…