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 […]
After three underwhelming sequels to James Cameron’s hard-wired hardware time travel thriller The Terminator (1984) in the past dozen years, it’s time to remind ourselves just how tight and clever and entertaining the original film was. Made for a mere $6 million and released in the fall of 1984 by a small independent sudio to instant […]
Caddyshack (1980), the definitive slobs versus snobs comedy, is ostensibly the story of a working-class golf caddy (Michael O’Keefe) at an exclusive country club trying to land a scholarship and plan his future, but his coming-of-age story becomes just another thread in the comic chaos. Chevy Chase, fresh off Saturday Night Live, takes top billing […]
There are two kinds of people, my friend. Those who love Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and those who resist the machismo and gallows humor of what is arguably the definitive spaghetti western. Leone’s first real attempt at mythologizing his vision of the American west (shot, of course, in the […]
A lovely film about regret, self-punishment and redemption on a scale both human and mythic (or at least American folkloric), Get Low (2009) is a feature film with the personality of a short story, filled with quietly offbeat characters and directed with a deft balance of comedy and tragedy. Which is why it had a […]
Experimenter (2015) opens with the infamous experiment that made Yale psychology professor Stanley Milgram’s reputation. Subjects are told to ask questions of a person in a booth (heard but unseen) and give them increasingly bigger electrical shocks every time they answer incorrectly. It’s an experiment in teaching methods, they are told, but in fact they […]
Jacques Demy, the most romantic of the French nouvelle vague filmmakers, loved American movies, especially musicals, but his taste for American musicals and candy-colored romance was balanced with a bittersweet sensibility. For all the energizing music and dreamy love affairs, his romances more often than not don’t really get happy endings. Kanopy presents these essentials. […]
The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001) – Leave it to Stephen Sommers to create an action-movie out of the sleepiest of monster movie icons. Under his direction, it’s an adventure film through a yesteryear Egypt right out of the movies but with a modern sensibility. Brendan Fraser is a bit callow in the […]
Rolling Stone once called The Big Lebowski (1998) “the most worshipped comedy of its generation.” I like to think of it as the Book of Duderonomy, the lost gospel of the post-modern Testament. Jeff Bridges is brilliant as the Dude, one of the most strangely centered individuals in the movies. This bowler/stoner/free spirit is mistaken […]
Before he won the Academy Award for Foreign Language film for A Separation, the first Iranian film to win an Oscar, Asghar Farhadi made About Elly (Iran, 2009), a compelling mix of mystery and social drama. Set over a family seaside vacation with three close-knit couples and their young children, this is a portrait of […]
