Review: Police Beat
RECOMMENDED There is a brooding beauty and quotidian peculiarity to Robinson Devor’s widescreen “Police Beat,” co-written by The Stranger critic and crime-blotter reporter Charles Mudede. “Police Beat”...
View ArticleReview: Iowa
“Requiem for a Pretension”? Well, I guess movies about meth and crank in the heartland ought to be ugly as sin, or uglier than “Spun,” and the DV-inflected hallucination-degradation fest “Iowa” (2005)...
View ArticleReview: Idlewild
RECOMMENDED Bryan Barber’s oft-magical Prohibition in the South-set Outkast musical, “Idlewild,” is a dynamic feast of anachronisms and heartfelt investment in older styles of storytelling—cliché,...
View ArticleReview: Michael Clayton
RECOMMENDED After writing three Jason Bourne screenplays, screenwriter Tony Gilroy directs “Michael Clayton,” his first drama. His title character (George Clooney, also an executive producer) is a...
View ArticleReview: We Own The Night
RECOMMENDED Autumn is upon us if the sere, severe, serious likes of “The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford” and James Gray’s brutal, assured third feature, “We Own The Night” are...
View ArticleReview: The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford
RECOMMENDED Simmering and brooding and hinting and teasing and taunting are not to every taste; some of the early reviews of Andrew Dominik’s follow-up to his thematically similar, but more jagged...
View ArticleReview: Gone Baby Gone
RECOMMENDED “I always believed it was the things you didn’t choose that make you who you are,” narrates young private investigator Patrick (Casey Affleck, “The Assassination of Jesse James By the...
View ArticleReview: American Gangster
RECOMMENDED Screenwriter Steven Zaillian (“Schindler’s List,” “All The King’s Men”) crafts a solid old-school saga of the all-American rise and fall of an African-American entrepreneur. How old? The...
View ArticlePresent tension: What a gas it is getting old with Sidney Lumet
By Ray Pride What’s the old saying? Keep your enemies closer but fuck your brother in the ass? Actually, the more modest old saying that applies to Sidney Lumet’s masterful thriller contains its title:...
View ArticleReview: Snowman’s Land
RECOMMENDED Stylish sardonic northern European miserabilism of a pleasing if lowwww-key order is much in display in Tomasz Thomson’s “Snowman’s Land” (2010), a grumpy assassin-on-the-run tale that...
View ArticleReview: Jackpot
RECOMMENDED “Jackpot” (Arme Riddere, 2011) is capable, candy-colored, often giddily gruesome Euro-action from Norway, replete with lottery winnings, double-crosses, discreet vivisection and a shootout...
View ArticleInterview Flashback: Quentin Tarantino Talks “Jackie Brown” And Quentin...
By Ray Pride Everyone who exposes themselves to the drizzle of publicity and movie lore and personalities on parade knows that Quentin Tarantino is an excitable boy. What’s new and notable is the calm...
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