Bronson
A director matched to a star matched to a subject. None of them want you to accept them, and that’s why you can’t help it.
Films released between 2000-2009
A director matched to a star matched to a subject. None of them want you to accept them, and that’s why you can’t help it.
A simple cop thriller elevated by a feeling. Pacino torments himself for us and it’s mostly wonderful.
A gutsy portrayal of a well-known story. But the passion has to come from you: the movie has little of its own.
With pure style, Wright re-arms the entire genre against us. Through comedy, we become the living dead.
Coppola’s wry, magical opus. Maybe falling in love has never been like this, but you’ll believe that it should be.
A movie where story and performance collide. As unsettling as we always knew Tilda Swinton could be.
A ton of effort goes into figuring out what to do with a Kung fu movie. It can be beautiful, and it can also fall apart in your hands.
Be wary of superheroes that seem like they were invented as puns. You might end up with a passionate mess, with 85% Dutch angles, undeveloped characters, and a soundtrack like a prepubescent DJ’s iPod on shuffle. “Justice is blind,” proclaims Daredevil. So is Matt Murdock. So is Mark Steven Johnson.
If Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was a tour of fantasy-land (who else thought their feelings seemed stuffed with baubles like gift-bags from a theme park?), The Chamber of Secrets is like accidentally wandering into the maintenance closet. Something is disenchanted by it, and I can think of no harsher criticism, to call something squinty that once was wide-eyed.
Cuaron achieves the dark enchantment the rest of the series desires. This is a promise finally fulfilled.
Snyder’s baroque maleness shines through and so does his purity. He loves superheroes. You have to decide if that’s enough.
Scorsese turns Goodfellas into a fever of talking, killing, and so much grinning. A mob movie for a new age.
A film with tasty new charm, that you can only find if you don’t expect it to be the same charm you already ate.
Finding Nemo has a brilliant way of keeping this theme in the shallows of its action, always present but rarely addressed directly in the ecosystem of all its wonderful ocean stuff.
Here’s a tribute to the old “road to …” pictures. It might be the best of them, and no better than them.
The warmest of the Harry Potter films. The best possible invitation to live in this world with him.
The film blasts an affectionate symphony of action spy movie set pieces, which Bird composes with such a self-believing style that he reminds me less of a director than of a virtuoso performer. And even they become a back-drop to what is essentially a mid-life crisis film, about a man who misses himself so much that he doesn’t even notice he has a family. Bird offers a genre fattened on mythic pretension a trimming alternative of joyous energy and dazzling characters.
Fukasaku proves to be a master of the micro-story, the combinations of tiny joys and creeping terrors into one huge, fleeting, emotional whole. After decades of cultural regression, he evokes Japanese cinema’s desperate, horrific roar. It has a primal beauty, of the kind that will always be repressed, misunderstood.
A movie that actually should have been weirder: it’s the conventions of the plot that bog the movie down from being as beautiful as it looks.
Adorable in a way movies aren’t anymore. The McDormand/Adams duo shines.
It takes zero seconds for Shark Tale to be the worst DreamWorks animated film I’ve ever seen. To find something worse you’d have to watch one of those Disney knock-offs that you pass over on Netflix with a cold shudder, or one of those YouTube-only CG student projects, or a film by Illumination. I’m going to scoop out its anchovy-sized heart and squeeze out the grease between my fingers before feeding it to my cat.
Cloverfield manages to encourage us to hold on to those we love and enjoy any day that isn’t the last day of our life. It manages to do so on the run, which it owes to a snappy script and Miller’s motor-mouth, his comedic tension, his well-meaning worry.
I’ve seen great filmmakers make bad movies. But I’ve never seen them willingly create the antimatter to their own style. With only the earnest request of his audience to question and unravel everything they believe about their brittle capitalistic existence, Shyamalan instead has made a film that makes me question and unravel everything I believe about Shyamalan.
Anderson saw Sandler’s rage and made a movie to justify it. The magic that results never gets old.
How else would the smartest screenwriter of the century make a story about losing your mind, except by making it literal? A romance that counts as all of them.
Hulk is flawed and huge and bold. It’s about the monster’s curse of being a man. It’s a superhero film that means something.