Film diary

You don’t need to know anything about chess to enjoy Bobby Fischer Against the World, but you may well want to learn more about the game after you’ve seen the film – if you don’t take it as a cautionary tale.

Bobby Fischer’s story is a true American tragedy, and possibly the twentieth century’s most fascinating example of the tenuous divide between genius and madness, as this film makes abundantly clear. The pacing is a… See more →

Much of Life During Wartime initially led me to believe it was a postmodern prank whose genesis took this form: “What if I made a sequel to Happiness? God, what a pointless, stupid idea. I’ll do it!”

As Michael Haneke’s Funny Games charges audiences with being complicit in the real-life violence they flock to see fictionalized on screen, Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime seems to make a mockery of the compulsion to drag new and… See more →

The extraordinary devotion Bill Cunningham has for his work means that any film about him is worth a look, but it’s a shame this one is not a more illuminating portrait. Amiable though he may be, Cunningham has made a career out of being an observer rather than a participant, and his years behind the lens have trained him well in the art of evasion. No one interviewed in this documentary seems to know anything… See more →

There were at least two high profile odes to testosterone of the pull-the-superhuman-war-hero-out-of-retirement-for-a-suicide-rescue-mission variety in 1985: Rambo: First Blood Part II and Commando. Both traffic in the big, loud, and dumb of 1980s Cold War action tropes. But only Commando is actually fun, because it has the good sense not to take itself so seriously.

Each of Arnold’s one-liners in Commando is a winking acknowledgement that this is high octane escapism, a celebration of wanton… See more →

Apparently the myth of the American sleepover is that its volume can rise above a whisper. This film tries so hard for understated adolescent authenticity that it forgets those first tentative steps into adulthood tend to be just as clumsily vibrant as they are furtively awkward. For a story that spans several nocturnal teenage gatherings on the last weekend of summer, it is remarkably – and fatally – sedate. I have no lack of patience… See more →

Surely no one was more disappointed by Sarah Palin’s absence from the 2012 presidential race than Stephen K. Bannon, the director of this two-hour campaign commercial.

The Undefeated is a chore. With “tell, don’t show” as its storytelling mantra, it chronicles Palin’s public works in her own words (using excerpts from her audiobook) and the words of the people who helped her. And there are so, so many words, all of them black or white,… See more →

Let’s get this out of the way: I am not a Kevin Smith fan. He has always seemed more interested in hiring actors to recite his own self-consciously profane monologues than in creating living, breathing characters, and the results are reliably tedious.

For the most part, though, Red State avoids Smith’s usual pitfalls and just lets Michael Parks work his villainous magic. Parks plays a fringe fundamentalist Christian preacher in the mold of Fred Phelps… See more →

Following Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on a week-long drive through the sights, sounds, and tastes of the northern English countryside, The Trip is equal parts tour documentary, buddy movie, and road trip flick. But more than anything, and in spite of its many laughs, it is a poignant meditation on aging.

Ostensibly playing themselves, Coogan and Brydon are a juxtaposition of insecure and self-possessed, of serious artist and happy-go-lucky entertainer. Their differences are sussed… See more →

A lot of foley artists and sound designers in the ’70s and ’80s seemed to have this fetishistic preoccupation with footsteps. In any scene where people were on the move, the soundtrack focused on footfalls to the exclusion of all else. The foley was produced with what I’m guessing was a maximum of three different kinds of shoes (loafers, heels, tennis shoes) on two different surfaces (asphalt, linoleum-tiled concrete). Despite being thoroughly unconvincing, it dominated… See more →

The Crazies arrived in 1973, five years after George Romero’s auspicious debut (Night of the Living Dead) and five years before his masterpiece (Dawn of the Dead). As a low-budget doomsday thriller, it lands directly between those two films as well, making great use of what he learned from Night’s confined space (paranoia, a winking cynicism, and subtle but devastating irony) while sketching out in long form what he would later condense into Dawn… See more →