Author Archive

Cast Away: There’s a Good Movie in There; All The Pretty Horses Disappoints

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away transpires in three sections that are wildly different from each other in purpose, tone and quality. The first, which introduces Tom Hanks as a troubleshooting, globetrotting FedEx executive, and then sends him into an airborne storm that leaves him stranded on a tropical island, is as functional but unremarkable as such
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Why The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane Should Be Avoided

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Down Anthony’s Lane But there’s the occasional example of film writing so extravagantly awful that my forbearance snaps and irritated silence bows to professional pride. Such a grating instance is Anthony Lane’s review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the Dec. 11 New Yorker. As a piece of prose, Lane’s polite rave for Ang Lee’s
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A Good Baby: Part Southern Gothic, Part Tone Poem, Part Folkloric Mystery; A Clueless French-Swiss Film

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

"American Independent Visions," which kicked off early this year with Lodge Kerrigan’s Claire Dolan and continues this week (Dec. 1-7) with Katherine Dieckmann’s A Good Baby, is a quarterly series that gives one-week runs at the Walter Reade Theater to independent films which so far haven’t attracted the sponsorship of a distributor. As such, it’s
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Unbreakable, from M. Night Shyamalan, Is a Fascinating Mess

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Unbreakable, the latest supernatural thriller from Sixth Sense director M. Night Shya-malan, is a fascinating mess. I have a feeling it’s gonna get beat up by many critics and probably will leave many viewers befuddled and disgruntled. But I came out of it high on the sheer exuberance of the filmmaking and eager to see
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De Niro and Gooding in Men of Honor: Hollywood Panders Yet Again

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

George Tillman Jr.’s Men of Honor is one of those Hollywood movies for which the term "old-fashioned" is both a compliment and a mark of the complimenter’s reservations. An uplift-minded story of personal and racial achievement set against the backdrop of the U.S. military circa the 1950s and 60s, the film is itself an honorable
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Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (A One and a Two)

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Yi Yi (A One And a Two) directed by Edward Yang The gatekeepers he was referring to are the people who determine which foreign-language films reach the general public: their number includes film distributors and, in a slightly more remote sense, festival programmers. Trusting these folk–that is, believing that every year they unfailingly winnow out
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Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, Starring Bjork, Mourns the mod.Euro.art.film

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Dancer in the Dark directed by Lars von Trier Cinema has been dying for a very long time–no doubt since the moment someone thought to anoint movies as an art–and we all love a good death scene. Around the time he filmed Jean-Paul Belmondo thrashing like a stuck flounder on the Paris pavements at the
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