SOUTHWEST BISTRO
A relatively warm New Year’s Eve spurred our trip to Downtown to enjoy the First Night activities. I’d be lying if I didn’t confess we spent most of our sojourn inside the toasty, dry interior of the Southwest Bistro gazing out the window at the hardier revelers. A steady stream of people in silly hats…
THE PIANIST
The Pianist is a great movie. It is also, it’s true, a Holocaust movie, one of a dozen or so feature-length Holocaust dramas and documentaries released in the past couple of years alone. But if it’s fair to say such films constitute a genre, then The Pianist largely transcends it. And one reason is that…
25TH HOUR
Spike Lee’s absorbing new drama takes place on the last day of freedom for Monty Brogan, a 31-year-old kid from Brooklyn who got a scholarship to a good college, where he started small by selling marijuana to his peers. A decade later, Monty (Edward Norton) faces seven years of hard time because someone told the…
FILM KITCHEN
There must be a word for the opposite of “anthropomorphization,” the Disney-approved practice of ascribing human characteristics to nonhuman beings, and which has given us mice that wear pants. “Animalize” comes close, and it partly describes what happens in Jeff Morelli’s short video Woodbunny: Little Treasures of Love. A young man acting like a rabbit…
Big Fish
When Edward Bloom comes into the world — his, not ours — he’s just too big for his mother’s britches. He literally shoots right out, then glides down the long linoleum hallway of the hospital on a slick of amniotic fluid. Or so he says, to anyone who will listen to his tales, over…
THE RECRUIT
“You guys make the best stuff,” says a fat, bald, slobbering enemy spy — with a generic European accent and a Big Mac in his mouth — as he interrogates a young CIA agent in The Recruit. “No country with a McDonald’s has ever attacked the United States.” That quip is the best thing The…
TALK TO HER
In the U.S., Pedro Almodóvar is the best-known filmmaker from Spain, which in terms of American celebrity is like being a tallish dwarf. However, in Spain, Almodóvar is primero, a critically well-regarded and commercially successful artist comparable to Woody Allen here at the height of his popularity. That’s the picture painted by Javier Cámara, who…
