Love Ranch and Great Directors

My newest reviews cover Taylor Hackford's latest stinker Love Ranch and the mildly entertaining, if hardly revelatory, Great Directors, in which Angela Ismailos interviews ten of her favorite directors. Both pieces are from Slant Magazine. Also on that site, my dismissive review of Alain Resnais' Wild Grass which was originally posted when that movie - currently enjoying its New York theatrical run - screened at last year's New York Film Festival.

An Outpouring of Cinema

A remarkable number of interesting films open this week in New York - of which the best may be the least heralded, Bill and Turner Ross' 45365, sneaking in for a week's run at the Anthology - and at one point or another I covered almost all of them. While new pieces for the Village Voice, Artforum, the L Magazine and Time Out New York bring me up to date, two older reviews - covering Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love and Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me - first ran when those film's played the local festival circuit, at New Directors/New Films and Tribeca respectively. Now they're getting theatrical releases and I'm re-running the reviews.

New Reviews:
Stonewall Uprising and 8: The Mormon Proposition (The L Magazine)
Let it Rain (Artforum)
The Nature of Existence (Village Voice)
45365 (Time Out New York)

Old Reviews:
I Am Love (Slant)
The Killer Inside Me (The House Next Door)

"A" as in Awful

The new A-Team picture hits theaters tomorrow and, while I usually don't review such slam-bang action fare, I made an exception in the case of Joe Carnahan's aggressive re-think of the popular '80s TV show. A combination of nostalgia for the moral simplicity of boyhood and a steady stream of amped-up, near incoherent bursts of violence combine to make this one very bad picture indeed.


The A-Team (Slant)
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Slant)
Reel Injun (Village Voice)

New Releases: Double Take and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead

Among this week's new releases are Double Take, Johan Grimonprez's overambitious mating of 1950's Folger's TV spots and clips from Alfred Hitchcock Presents with a Borges derived narrative about doppelgangers and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead, a joyless Hamlet-vampire movie which manages to kill all the potential fun implied in that set-up. Now in its second week of release is The Father of My Children, which I covered during this year's New Directors/New Films festival. All reviews are from Slant Magazine.