“Do your parents know you’re Ramones?” If Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979) isn’t the greatest rock and rebellion film of all time it is certainly on the short list, a pure, cheerfully juvenile blast of blitzkrieg guitar rock, Looney Tunes sight gags, teenage hormones, and rebellion against authority because it’s there. They aren’t exactly […]
Steve Carrell is a sweet, shy middle-aged geek and the last American virgin in The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), the feature debut of director Judd Apatow (who wrote the film with Carrell), an oddly sweet mix of romantic comedy and adolescent shenanigans, albeit with a slightly older cast. When he’s pulled out of the stock room […]
If all you know of Yasujiro Ozu, Japan’s national treasure of a film director in the 20th century, is the quiet restraint and rigorous simplicity of his sound films, then you only have half of the story of the director’s remarkable career. The artist called the most “Japanese” of Japanese directors was a voracious film […]
Married to the Mob (1988) – Two years after his breakthrough film Something Wild, Jonathan Demme returned to the genre with another mix of offbeat humor and dangerous criminals. This colorful gangster comedy stars Michelle Pfeiffer as the frustrated wife of mid-level mobster (a very young Alec Baldwin) and Matthew Modine as a dedicated and […]
The Tiger Hunter (2016) – Danny Pudi (Abed from the cult sitcom Community) plays an engineer who travels from his village in India, where he runs the local electronic repair shop, to Chicago to take a high-paying position in an American firm. He’s determined to live up to the reputation of his father, revered in […]
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Stanley Kubrick’s screwball satire of cold war posturing and mutually assured destruction, is the funniest film ever made about nuclear holocaust. But it didn’t begin as a comedy. The source novel, Peter George’s “Red Alert,” was a grave contemplation of the […]
Keri Russell glows in Waitress (2007), the sweet, sour and sexy film by actress-turned-filmmaker Adrienne Shelly. She is amazingly funny as Jenna, the melancholy pie queen of a highway eatery in a vaguely drawn small Southern town. This is a place where the waitresses call each other “Hon” and toss in a little good-natured attitude […]
“You interested in joining the CIA? The benefits are great. The trick in not getting killed. That’s the key to the whole benefits program.” Ever had a relative who thinks they’re part of the CIA? Ever had one who really was? The original The In-Laws (1979) tackles both at once and delivers one of the […]
Wet Hot American Summer (2001) has lived longer than anyone would have predicted while watching it in 2001. The self-aware summer camp spoof/nostalgia lampoon spawned a prequel and a sequel series for Netflix that play out in the same cheeky, silly, self-aware manner of adult actors playing at being teenagers. It feels as much an […]
One of the surprises in the 2015 Oscar nominations was that Force Majeure (Sweden, 2014), Sweden’s official entry for the foreign language film category and a Cannes film festival winner, did not place among the five nominated films. Director Ruben Östlund gives us a family on vacation and what appears to be the inciting event […]
