Bond's Brave New World

Skyfall

Directed by Sam Mendes

Four Stars

If Sam Mendes’ splendid “Skyfall”, the latest installment in the James Bond franchise, reminds us of anything, it is probably that the vast majority of the Bond films we’ve seen through the years just haven’t been very good. Protected by the cloak of a durable formula, iconic score, and the innate magnetism of a transcendent cultural icon, almost always enjoyable, usually clever, though seldom thrilling, the series has existed safely in cruise control for decades. “Skyfall”, however, is thrilling. One would need to go back, way back, back through the Pierce Brosnan years, back through the Timothy Dalton years, back to perhaps Guy Hamilton’s “Live and Let Die” in 1973 to find a Bond film this heedlessly inventive and captivating.

The Wacky Antics of War Heroes

Red Tails

Directed by Anthony Hemingway

Two and One Half Stars

Perhaps a greater rebuke to racism than Anthony Hemingway’s tepid “Red Tails” is the reality that the film got made at all. George Lucas, that most notorious toymaker of the silver screen, purportedly dumped some $53 million of his own money into the film because the studios had trepidations about the marketability of a film with all black actors. I have little doubt the film will do well. That worry seems a miscalculation. But if the film does perform poorly at the box office it won’t be because of the skin color of its leads. It will be because it is a bad film. Caught between a rock and a hard place, the varying success of the effort will either validate the hesitant studios’ prophecies of lingering cultural racism or their own cynicism.

Violence In the Media Reaches its Apex

The Hunger Games

Directed by Gary Ross

Two Stars

I have not read Suzanne Collins’ young adult book series, “The Hunger Games”. Occasionally a film adaptation comes along that demands this information up front from its critics. But the multiple failings of director Gary Ross’s effort are not uniformly cinematic. They begin at the basest levels of the narrative, and indeed the central premise of the film was a pill I simply could not swallow.

The Pantheon (2012)

#1 2001: A Space Odyssey

Jon's Picks
Rollan's Picks

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1969) +1
2. The Third Man (Carole Reed, 1949) -1
3. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1944) Even
4. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931) +1
5. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) +3
6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928) -2
7. Pyscho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) +19
8. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979) +1
9. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) -2
10. Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) +2

The Golden Iris Awards - Including the Best Films of 2011

Best of 2011

1. Take Shelter

Directed by Jeff Nichols

"Take Shelter" embodies a moment in time, a period in American history when honest, hardworking people, who have done what the proverbial American dream has dictated they must do to succeed, have been stricken with the ominous premonition that something beyond their control threatens to come along and wash away everything they've worked for, the lives they've built for themselves. As a character study, it is intimate and candid, and Michael Shannon was more deserving of an Oscar nomination for his performance here than any other actor I saw in 2011. As a profile in paranoid schizophrenia it is accurate and heartbreaking. But as an allegory for the economic recession it is inventive and harrowing and very, very powerful. Jeff Nichols' "Take Shelter" has tapped into a national mood. With any discernible degree of cosmic justice, time will endow this film with historical significance. "Take Shelter" is the best movie of the year.

Chronicling the Year-End Binge

This time of year, in regions (like here in Nebraska) where most of the year's films don't make it to town until very late - if at all - anyone plotting to compile a list of the year's best must consume an inhuman number of films in a mercilessly narrow time frame, this amounts to raiding the local art house theater, where films like Steve McQueen's "Shame", which just opened here, saw the bulk of its reviews hit the papers in late November. To Netflix, both on disc and instant watch, and to the lingering success of a few films that have found their way to the  local multiplex. The following is a brief rundown of what I've seen in the last 8 days. With any luck, I'll post micro-reviews of as many of these films as I can in the coming days.

Sorry for the Delay, Folks

It's been a while, no?

Perhaps I should have shared this earlier, but I've taken up arms as a contributing critic for efilmcritic.com. I'll be directing you to them here as they go up, which should be about once a week. My sole review so far has been "Take Shelter", available here, which was among the very best 2011 has had to offer me. Like our Facebook page for quick links to my eFilmCritic reviews.

With my formal criticism headed to a more prominent outlet, the format of this blog will likely undergo something of a change. Hopefully, chief among these changes will be a more consistent output. Me and Jon will still compile our annual Pantheon in the summer. I will engage more in the kind of 'first impression' criticism that one might find at, say, Richard Brody's "The Front Row" blog at the New Yorker. Keep an eye out for sporadic observations of any old film I happen to see. Keep an eye out also for my spontaneous "DVD of the Moment" segments. Finally, I'm in my year-end movie binge, catching up on all the movies of acclaim the year had to offer. My annual top 10 list will go up during Oscars week, along with some commentary on the myriad ways the Academy fouled up this year. For now though, because I'm behind I'm going to resort to the frantic method of micro-review clusters my esteemed colleague Jon employs over at The Film Brief.

All the best,
R