Author Archive

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind ; Love Liza

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on January 21, 2003. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Love LizaDirected by Todd Louiso In a prerelease interview about Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the film’s first-time director, George Clooney, confessed that he’d gone a little crazy with the film’s design. "The knock on me will be that it’s over-directed," he predicted. He’s right: by and large, that has been the knock against this
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Dean of the Dead: Interview with George Romero

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on January 14, 2003. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

When was the last time you saw a great horror movie–not just a scary or revolting tale, but one that had useful things to say about modern life? Quite some time, probably. Aside from the occasional pop culture earthquake (The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project) or critical favorite-turned-cult-classic (The Devil’s Backbone, The Kingdom), most
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The Pianist; Max

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on January 7, 2003. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

MaxDirected by Menno Meyjes A recurring refrain in film reviewing says it’s dangerous to depict Holocaust themes in a drama, because drama cannot compete with reality’s horror. But for all their cliches, falsehoods, dramatic shortcuts and crude grasping after "entertainment values," movies are still the closest thing we have to a collective memory. Critics who
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Satin Rouge

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on August 27, 2002. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Satin Rouge Directed by Raja Amari You can envision a number of ways this material might be played. It could be one of those superheated, so-serious-it’s-silly movies that Adrian Lyne is always directing; or it could turn into something like The Full Monty or Strictly Ballroom–a well-crafted, borderline slick foreign film, the kind of art
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LaBute’s Possession

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on August 20, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

In films that jump between the present and the past, the past often seems both more real and more cinematic. Why? Maybe because such films exist to remind us that the present comes from the past, and in any kind of story, the beginning is almost always more interesting than the “present.” Even The Godfather,
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Spy Kids 2; Stuart Little 2

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on August 13, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Stuart Little 2 Directed by Rob Minkoff Quality-wise, kids’ entertainment is as cyclical as anything; you go through years that deliver a couple of good movies (think of 1999, which brought Toy Story 2 and The Iron Giant, or 2001, which delivered Monsters, Inc. and Shrek). Other years are mostly terrible–and so far, this one
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Full Frontal

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on August 6, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Full Frontal Directed by Steven Soderbergh With Full Frontal, Soderbergh’s remarkable creative run hits a speed bump. Shot partly on consumer-model digital video, it’s a heavily improvised riff on artifice and reality in Hollywood (gee, we’ve never seen that before) in which an ensemble cast faces the reality of their own plastic lives (or something
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Austin Powers in Goldmember

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on July 30, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

When Eddie Murphy’s concert film Raw came out 15 years ago, the standard line in negative reviews was that Murphy didn’t need criticism, he needed a shrink. It was nearly impossible to deny his skill as a performer and storyteller, but the film’s blunt anger, paranoia and desperation threw a lot of people for a
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Road to Perdition

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on July 23, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Road to Perdition, a sprawling drama about a glum hit man going on the road with his young son to escape the crime family that sold him out, can be described in many different ways: as a gangster picture, a drama, a period piece, a comic book adaptation, a fantastic meditation on violence and its
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Men In Black II

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on July 16, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Tommy Lee Jones has one of the great faces in movies. As Men In Black II’s Agent K–a retired secret agent who leaves his job as a post office manager to track immigrant space aliens and bust the ones that are up to no good–his sandblasted mug and vertically creased cheekbones testify to experiences most
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