LABORS OF LOVE: FROM HITCHCOCK TO LAUREL & HARDY
Everyone has to make a living. I don’t begrudge anyone who punches a clock or devotes his/herself to a job that isn’t terribly rewarding. But I have special admiration for people who manage to pay the bills and still—often…
TRAIN DREAMS
If there is a lovelier, more heartfelt film than Train Dreams now playing in theaters I have yet to see it. The protagonist is a wide-eyed innocent, an unworldly loner who venerates the gifts of Mother Nature, as well…
NUREMBERG
Nuremberg is not a documentary, nor is it a remake of Stanley Kramer’s 1961 Oscar winner Judgment at Nuremberg. It is contemporary in its dialogue and editing style, as if to proclaim right up front that this is not…
GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S FRANKENSTEIN
This is the movie Guillermo del Toro was born to make. He first read Mary Shelley’s novel as a boy and it has informed everything he has done since then. Del Toro admits that he only started working on…
HOUSE OF DYNAMITE
By sheer coincidence, I watched the 1964 movie Fail-Safe just a few weeks ago, and it’s extraordinary how closely it resembles Kathryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite. I’m not talking about plagiarism. The 51-year-old film is very much of its time, along with Seven…
MY NEW BOOK—FROM A NEW PUBLISHER
There’s a new publisher in town, and he’s cast a wide net: not only is he commissioning new manuscripts from a field of seasoned writers and directors; he’s also finding unpublished material by filmmakers ranging from Alexander Mackendrick to…
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
Do you find yourself absorbing the day’s latest news and feel like screaming? Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson found another solution: making One Battle After Another, a film so outrageous—yet so timely—that it seems to say, “Don’t scream…just laugh at the sheer…
