If you had come up to me a year-and-a-half ago, told me that David Lynch was producing a Werner Herzog film and asked me what it was going to be about, “guy kills his mom with a samurai sword to act out Aeschylus’ Oresteia and takes two flamingos hostage” probably wouldn’t have been too far […]
Posts by: robertr
Sombre Review
March 20, 2010 at 10:24 am
Verite camerawork has been a major force in the modern horror film, but to mixed success at best. I always hoped that somewhere out there, someone had gotten it right. That someone was Philippe Grandrieux. He did it back in 1998, a year before Blair Witch made the technique into a style, with his film […]
Great Scene: Raging Bull
March 20, 2010 at 10:22 am
Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull is often called a “boxing movie,” and grouped alongside the likes of Rocky in discussions of such things. The American Film Institute, for its part, proclaimed it the No. 1 sports movie of all time. The label is erroneous. Raging Bull concerns itself with many things, but sports is not chief […]
John Ford’s America: Monument Valley at the MFA
March 20, 2010 at 10:20 am
There are perhaps few directors whose films have suffered as much as John Ford’s have in the transition of big screen to televisions. While the politics can be oppressively conservative Ford’s films, without question, always look beautiful. It is this beauty that defines the current series at the MFA running right now, The Making of […]
The Bounty Hunter Review
March 20, 2010 at 10:19 am
As I sat on the Green Line on my way to the screening of Andy Tennant’s The Bounty Hunter, I thought I knew exactly what I was going to see. In fact, I even began writing this review in my head. However, I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, there was the obvious scene or cliché joke […]
Eric Skillman Interview
March 4, 2010 at 12:22 am
You may not know the name, but you’ll know the work. He creates a feeling for an entire film, distilled down to a tiny rectangular image. The best of his colleagues and the best of the artists of the past have been able to stop you in your tracks as you’ve walked around the video […]
How Subtitles Change Everything
January 28, 2010 at 1:11 am
Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy is not exactly a DVD release that needs to be reviewed. To put it simply: if you are a lover of cinema, especially Italian Neo-Realist films, these DVDs are a must-own. With improved transfers of image and sound, and loaded with extra features, the new Criterion Collection releases have finally brought […]
Crazy Heart
January 23, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Crazy Heart, directed by Scott Cooper, and adapted from the novel by Thomas Cobb follows a pretty stereotypical plot. Jeff Bridges stars as country music singer Bad Blake, a performer who has seen better days. He is overweight, always drunk, and looks like he could use a good shower with a shave. Bad travels the […]
The Book of Eli
January 23, 2010 at 3:35 pm
I’m no sociologist, but it would appear that the current socio-economic climate has finally caught up with Hollywood, and they have reacted pretty much as expected: with lots of explosions. The apocalypse has become a major feature in American film, spurred by a fear of the coming end of our time as the dominant country, […]
The Man from London
January 23, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Bela Tarr is my favorite filmmaker, and The Man From London, coming soon to the MFA, is only his third film in the last twenty years. The last two, 1994’s Satantango and 2000’s The Werckmeister Harmonies are my favorite films of their respective decades, and the later is also simply my favorite film. Unless some […]