“It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.” Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestseller remains the great American epic of the immigrant dream turned family business. Al Pacino stars as Michael Corleone, the clean-cut white sheep and patriotic soldier boy son of New York Godfather Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando in an Oscar–winning performance), and this […]
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 […]
Aaron Eckhart is the glib, proudly obfuscating “Yuppie Mephistopheles” (in the words of his detractors) tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor in Thank You For Smoking (2006), Jason Reitman’s wickedly witty adaptation of Christopher Buckley’s novel. He’s also our hero. With brazen righteousness, Naylor zealously defends the right of “defenseless” corporate giants’ to market products that, when […]
“There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.” The acclaimed cop show Naked City: Complete Series (1958-1959), set and shot on the streets of New York City, is ostensibly inspired by the influential 1948 film of the same name, a film noir with documentary immediacy. But it plays […]
The Killer Elite / Noon Wine (1966) (Twilight Time, Blu-ray) – By even the most generous measure, The Killer Elite (1975) is one of Sam Peckinpah’s weakest film. Which, by Peckinpah standards, is still a cut above a great many films. He manages to get his own sensibility into the tale of black ops mercenaries […]
Apocalypse Now (1979) and Apocalypse Now: Redux (1979/2001) – Drawing from a script by John Milius, rewritten under the influence of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and a production in a constant state of chaos, Francis Ford Coppola turns Vietnam into a war as drug-addled theme park ride: “Pirates of the South Seas” with real […]
“I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else’s life,” states an aged but still sharp and tough Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) in Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012). Neither does this colorful biopic, an HBO original movie about their passionate and tumultuous relationship (both romantic and professional), directed by Philip Kaufman, a filmmaker fascinated […]
