The Ghost Writer: A Real Roman à Clef
We’ve had examples of prison literature throughout history, but The Ghost Writer may be the closest we’ve ever had to prison filmmaking. Roman Polanski...
Remember Me: An Affair to Forget
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” I’m not sure to what extent that applies to movies, but one reason...
Not the Finest Anything
As boilerplate as its title would suggest, Brooklyn’s Finest is no different from any other gritty New York City cop thriller made in the...
Oscar’s Hidden Gold
Hey, look! It’s an Oscar ceremony in March, just like we used to have every year. With all the attention on the Best Picture...
Tolstoy Finds The Last Station
When he died, Leo Tolstoy was basically an old hippie. Immensely rich and famous from authoring War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the Russian...
Butterscotch Isn’t Sweet
Bart van Bemmel talks quickly, and I'm not sure whether that's how he usually rolls or whether it's because he's eager to tell me...
Unhappy Haneke
When you watch slasher flicks and other movies that kill off innocent characters like ants, do you feel bad for those onscreen victims?
Do you...
North Carolina Burning
It all started with a casual remark. In 1970, Timothy Tyson was an 11-year-old white boy growing up in Oxford, N.C., when one of...
GasLand Drills for Answers
In December 2008, live-theater producer and filmmaker Josh Fox (his 2008 film, Memorial Day, was based on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal) was approached...
Love Is All Around
Even before Valentine's Day has reached the theaters, gimlet-eyed observers are already comparing it to the 2003 British film Love Actually, both movies being...
