Saturday, February 4, 2012
2011-11-10 01:57:12
MUTANTS AND MYSTICS: A Mind-Growing Trip
How many kids reading comics, envision themselves flying? They may imagine making that single bound off the roof of their home, only to land with a deflating thud (and maybe even a broken arm)? Mutant and Mystics is a throwback to a time when comics and sci-fi first expanded our notion of what’s possible, when adolescent dreams were fueled by the visions of Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Philip K...More
2011-10-17 20:43:15
MONSTERS IN AMERICA: Twilight vs. True Blood
Where do monsters come from? Filmgoers may think Frankenstein arose in a mad scientist’s laboratory. But the vivid imagination of teenage author Mary Shelley brought her monster to life in 1818. Perhaps rising scientific experimentation fueled Shelley’s creativity...More
2011-09-08 14:18:45
DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK: The Ghost Of Katie Holmes Haunts A B-Movie
by JOHN MARKS The scariest thing in Troy Nixey's Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark isn't the house. It definitely isn't the gaggle--or is it gobble?--of CGI creatures that terrorize the people who live in the house. No, the only real fright here is in the actress formerly known as Katie Holmes, who gives this entertaining if forgettable movie its one true hint of terror...More
2011-07-25 17:44:56
CAPTAIN AMERICA: Hip to be Square
Captain America: The First Avenger is a rousing throwback to the golden age of Hollywood when heroes and villains were much clearer and cleaner. Brooklynite Steve Rogers demonstrates robust heroism even as a 98-pound weakling. But Dr...More
2011-06-19 20:52:16
THE TREE OF LIFE: The Gospel According To Malick
by JOHN MARKS Let's be reductive for a moment, shall we? Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the famously shy director Terrence Malick hasn't made a complex and profound movie that justifiably baffles critics. Let's imagine instead that he's made a very artful version of an extremely familiar American pitch...More
2011-06-14 07:53:54
SUPER 8: Silences Between Explosions
by JOHN MARKS When we think movies, we see images on a screen. That's only natural. Movies are motion pictures, right? Yet so much of the power in the art form resides in sound. How we hear a movie matters almost as much as how we view it. You might say sound is to picture in movies as smell is to taste in eating...More
2011-05-26 01:50:34
THE TREE OF LIFE: Reaching for Eternity
The Tree of Life resurrects the era when Hollywood still aspired to greatness. Not since 2001: A Space Odyssey (or less successfully, The Fountain) has a filmmaker attempted to capture both the origins of life and our ultimate destination...More
2011-05-16 09:17:24
BRIDESMAIDS: Women Can Be As Funny As Men, But Genuine Class Rage Trumps Them Both
by JOHN MARKS Late in Bridesmaids, a movie ostensibly about female wedding angst, the exquisitely wrought actress Rose Byrne is forced to sit in a car so old and junky that--we're told--it doesn't even have a cup-holder. She plays Helen, an insufferable and insufferably rich socialite who seems never to have encountered worn brake pads before...More
2011-04-27 11:03:26
MEEKS CUTOFF: The Greatest Western You'll Never See
by JOHN MARKS It's little more than a shard of a lost saga, a slice out of the flank of one of those movies that rarely gets made anymore, a film with landscape, guns, horses, men in hats, women in bonnets and, yes, even wagons. That's the mystery of Meeks Cutoff...More
2011-02-05 15:45:44
ENTER THE VOID: The Most Astonishing Movie Of Our Era Made Me So Mad I Had To See It Twice
by JOHN MARKS On a bitterly cold night in Manhattan, having made my way through the dark and snow to the IFC Center to see Greg Araki's Kaboom, I found myself directed to a line and told to wait. The doors would open in five minutes. The line grew and grew...More
2011-02-03 11:27:25
MAGIC TRIP: Driving with Neal Cassady
How did the beat generation embodied by Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac spawn the hippies of the sixties? At the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, I saw the missing link. The psychedelic documentary, Magic Trip, puts viewers on the bus with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters enoute to the 1964 World's Fair...More
2011-01-27 03:40:10
The 2011 Sundance Film Festival is driven by ultimate questions. John Horn from the Los Angeles Times notes how bad faith fuels films like Salvation Boulevard, The Ledge and Kevin Smith’s bloody Red State. Festival Programmer John Cooper told Horn, “It’s America looking at itself...More
2010-12-16 03:58:46
With all kinds of cinematic year end lists, critics’ awards, and Golden Globe nominations officially doled out, the Oscar race is definitely on. At this point, it looks like there are three (or four) serious contenders for best picture: The King’s Speech, The Social Network, and The Fighter...More
2010-11-06 16:24:53
TRUE GRIT: Obama's John Wayne Moment Has Finally Come
by JOHN MARKS Over the next few weeks, a lot of people will be giving the President of the United States advice about how to work with the House of Representatives, our newly elected Republican legislators whose leadership has already made clear their number one priority...More
2010-10-24 15:27:36
by JOHN MARKS Last summer, I had one of the peak movie-going experiences of my life. Outdoors, against the backdrop of Monument Valley, courtesy of the Navaho tribe, I watched a screening of John Ford's The Searchers, one of the two or three greatest westerns of all time...More
2010-10-23 21:53:25
A FILM UNFINISHED: Unplugging Nazi Propaganda
This week, I had the privilege of hosting a screening of the quietly powerful documentary, A FILM UNFINISHED. Four long forgotten film reels were discovered featuring footage shot by the Nazis circa 1942. Labeled “Das Ghetto,” the footage corrects long held assumptions about life in the Warsaw Ghetto...More
2010-10-16 04:31:13
THE SOCIAL NETWORK: Lust For The Deal
by JOHN MARKS The Social Network is the most erotic American movie in a decade. The sex isn't in the hips and breasts. It's in the words and fingertips. It's in the depositions. When we think of sex in the movies, what do we conjure? People over fifty may think of something European, a pinch of a breast in a bed scene in a Truffaut film or Brigitte Bardot's magnificent, overwhelming derriere in Contempt...More
2010-10-14 01:11:37
ETERNAL CINEMA: From Here to Hereafter
By Craig Detweiler Will Clint Eastwood’s new film, HEREAFTER, rise to the level of previous meditations on eternity? Advance reviews suggest that after a shocking recreation of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Hereafter becomes a ponderous, European style meditation on grief...More
2010-10-07 02:36:50
DIVINE HANDIWORK IN DISNEY'S SECRETARIAT
Cynics may scoff at the arrival of another cinematic sports story. We’ve seen underdogs triumph in Hoosiers, Rudy, and The Rookie. We’ve followed the real life races of Seabiscuit. We’re cheered for Leigh Anne Tuohy in her efforts to guard Michael Oher’s Blind Side...More
2010-09-21 07:01:50
MACHETE: Border Trash Masterpiece
by JOHN MARKS This is how it started. Once upon a time in 1992, way before Once Upon A Time In Mexico, Robert Rodriguez made the ultra-cheapie indie El Mariachi, a canonical work for geeks, the sawed-off shotgun equivalent of Pride And Prejudice or Moby Dick...More
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