If we posit that a great film is both cinematography and story, EVEREST is not great as it does extremely well in the first area but fares poorly in the second. Obviously, Everest, the mountain, summit of the world, films magnificently. It is mighty, spectacular, awe-inspiring, frightening. It is both threatening and irresistible. Irresistible to the multitude striving to climb to the top or ... more >
ARCHIVES

EVEREST

SICARIO
Every Cannes Festival (and so, every festival) needs a good shoot-em-up movie. We got ours this year with SICARIO, starring Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt, and Josh Brolin in the supporting role. SICARIO's at-times lack of depth and the expeditious nature of certain plot twists make this solid revenge drama imperfect. But an extraordinary lensmanship by Roger Deakins and ominous, ... more >

Inherent vice
In college I wrote a paper on the subversion of the detective novel in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. I got an A, although the paper received its highest compliment in 2009. That’s when Pynchon finally lived up to my astonishing insight and published a detective novel, “Inherent vice.” This survey of Los Angeles weirdness circa 1970 is brought to the screen by Paul Thomas Anderson. The ... more >

Men in Black 3
“Men in Black 3” is a paycheck movie for everyone involved, except the audience, who again get another middling, phoned-in sequel looking to drain their wallets with its average 3-D-ness. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones again return as agents J and K, except Jones much more briefly. His Agent K has been extinguished, all part of a plan by alien baddie Boris the Animal (the always-funny Jemaine ... more >
Jonah Hex
The comic book is to this age what shoot'em up Westerns were to an older time: an outlet for children’s heroic fantasies. So perhaps Jonah Hex, a combination of the two, was inevitable. This DC Comics Western slyly refers to this fact, as a Frontier father watches his son read an illustrated Western storybook by candlelight. The father tells him it isn’t highest literary material. He can feel ... more >