This latest adaptation of a Steven King short story involves – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – a cynical writer who becomes the victim of his own skepticism. John Cusack is well cast as an unflappable author who has written a series of second-rate books about haunted places, yet believes in nothing [...]
Entries from July 2007
1408 (2007)
July 30th, 2007 · No Comments
Tags: Capsule · Drama · Horror
After the Wedding (2006)
July 29th, 2007 · No Comments
There are times when a film, even when recommended, so exceeds any expectations that the experience wipes away, if only for a moment, all of the disappointments that occur when mediocrity is found to lie behind the curtain of hype that precedes a film’s release. In this case, the savior of cinema was a [...]
Tags: Drama · Foreign Language · Review · Romance
The Boss of It All (2007)
July 22nd, 2007 · No Comments
Lars von Trier’s latest effort, a comedy set among a quirky set of employees of a small software firm, can’t possibly escape comparisons to The Office (the BBC version, of course), or even Office Space. My expectation, as an admirer of the Danish director, was to encounter a clever yet obtuse comedy. I was [...]
Tags: Comedy · Director · Foreign Language · Review
The Firemen’s Ball (1967)
July 15th, 2007 · 1 Comment
The Firemen’s Ball is one of three feature films completed by Czech director Milos Forman prior to his emigrating to the United States, and was the follow-up to his successful Loves of a Blonde (reviewed below). With a touch of endearment, Forman lampoons a rural fire brigade and symbolically skewers the mentality of communism, leading [...]
Tags: Comedy · Foreign Language · Review
Loves of a Blonde (1965)
July 15th, 2007 · No Comments
Experienced outside of its contemporary social and cultural context, Loves of a Blonde is an oddity, a great example of cinema’s ability to deliver a mixture of the idiosyncratic and the universal. Here we are introduced to a few inhabitants of a factory town in the countryside surrounding Prague, a place where the type of [...]
Tags: Comedy · Drama · Foreign Language · Review · Romance
Ladies In Lavender (2004)
July 8th, 2007 · No Comments
Ladies in Lavender, written and directed by British actor Charles Dance, from a short story by William Locke, received a rather limited release in the United States, and would have remained off my radar except for a recommendation (which is almost always a welcome thing) from my parents (to whom one should almost always listen). [...]
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
