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Film Review: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, by Andrew Dominik | Comments (0) | Below is a summary — View the full post » It’s not just that The Assassination of Jesse James is slow; it’s that it’s obstructively slow, in a way that serves no purpose except to make Dominik look terribly smart and artistic. It plods from one gorgeous, pointless set-piece to another, saying little, and worse giving no insight into a character that has become a cliché over the years, namely that of James himself.
Film Review: American Gangster, by Ridley Scott | Comments (0) | Below is a summary — View the full post » With films like Inside Man, The Departed and Zodiac all performing well in the last few months, the crime movie appears to be undergoing something of a renaissance. One element of that comeback is a return to the kind of smart, thoughtful crime films that flourished in the seventies. American Gangster follows that trend, not only on the obvious level that it’s set in the seventies, but with its grim urbanity, its muted colour palette, and its attempts to say something intelligent and to reach outside the specific sphere of crime and punishment to make wider social and political points.
Film Review: Blade Runner, the Final Cut, by Ridley Scott | Comments (0) | Below is a summary — View the full post » Blade Runner is one of the greatest films of the last century, and perhaps the greatest science-fiction movie of all time. Writers Hampton Fancher and David Peoples rifled through Philip K Dick’s magnificent, subversive novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, tacked on a dose of the emerging cyberpunk ethos and layered it all in a sheen of Chandler and Hammett. Then director Scott, having cut his sci-fi teeth in style with Alien, took those varied allusions and ran with them, creating in one fell swoop a new aesthetic of the future…
Film Review: The Darjeeling Limited, by Wes Anderson | Comments (0) | Below is a summary — View the full post » Anderson seems increasingly happy to wrap a group of devoted fans around himself … and which group you fall into depends on whether or not you get the joke. But at least with his previous films there was a joke to get. If there’s one in The Darjeeling Limited then either I missed it completely or (my personal theory) it just wasn’t very funny. Of course that criticism only holds up if you choose to think of it as a comedy, and often it’s hard to tell.