Nurse Betty. – Review – movie review Nicole Armour NURSE BETTY Neil LaBute, USA, 2000 NURSE BETTY, POLA X, GEORGE WASHINGTON, IT ALL STARTS TODAY Midway through Neil LaBute’s new chase comedy, Nurse Betty, Charlie (Morgan Freeman) and Wesley (Chris Rock), in hot pursuit of Renee Zellweger’s waitress on the lam, argue over the purpose […]
Picture Perfect? Gregory Solman Movies travel from salt-mine storage vaults to multiple stages of mastering, compression, and tweaking. So who to blame for your less than dazzling DVD? According to legend, Godard once quipped that movies can’t be shown on TV because in the translation they become, in essence, television. That said, let’s assume for […]
Primetime pick: Pee-wee’s Playhouse Gavin Smith Primetime Pick: Pee-wee’s Playhouse At long last, the indisputable genius of Paul Reubens, aka Pee-wee Herman, is rescued from oblivion through the miracle of DVD. The immortal Emmy-award winning Pee-wee’s Playhouse (Image, $49.99 each) was essential Saturday morning viewing from the Fall of 1986 until it was unceremoniously yanked […]
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Kent Jones PETER JACKSON, U.S., 2002 Boasting more spectacular setpieces than its predecessor but lacking its impressive emotional and geographical span, The Two Towers may suffer a bit from “Middle Trilogy” syndrome. The new movie is more concerned with picking up narrative threads than in tracing them, with […]
Critics Choice – released films – Brief Article – Illustration Thanks to this issue’s participants: Nicole Armour of FILM COMMENT, Manohla Dargis of L.A. Weekly and Harper’s Bazaar, Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times, Dave Kehr of CitySearch.com, Gerald Peary of The Boston Phoenix, Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader, Amy Taubin of The Village […]
Fahrenheit 9/11 Chris Chang FILM COMMENT’s May/June cover proclaimed it “Movie of the Year.” So why didn’t it fare as well in the year-end wrap-up? Because it’s actually two films. The first existed in a time of sensed opportunity fired by desperate need. Watching it before Nov. 3 the message was clear: no one in […]
Star Wars: always Andrew Lewis Conn This Article had its genesis in the fall semester of 1993, when I was a junior at Cornell University, where I double-majored in Film and English. (Please reserve all Liberal Arts jokes for the end of this article.) I was enrolled in a course entitled Jung and Film, taught […]
Planet of the apes – film director George Mendonca Chris Chang If you stare at a word long enough, it turns into gibberish. If you stare at a human long enough — especially if it’s given a chance to open its mouth — the human turns into gibberish. Errol Morris is a filmmaker who has […]
Straight to film: can video cut it on the big screen? Gavin Smith Can video cut it on the big screen? The pros and cons of tape to film and the video-ization of the movies. “The great hope is that now with these little 8mm video recorders … one day some little girl in Ohio […]
Another green world: the blossoming of Kiyoshi Kurosawa Chuck Stephens “What the fuck is it with this forest?” Sounds like a cop question: street-phrased, rhetorical, pissed-off — something snarled by an aggravated flatfoot who’s wandered off his beat. Or maybe it’s a surly query from some private dick: the mutterings of Mike Hammer, out for […]