Category: Year

  • Origin stories: The Apprentice and Saturday Night

    It’s not only comic book heroes and fairy tale characters who get origin stories. Cultural icons deserve them, too – or at least get them, deserving or not. It is hard to dispute, however, that the American pop culture landscape hasn’t been deeply influenced by two icons closely associated with New York: Donald Trump and Saturday…

  • Trap (2024)

    If movies won Oscars for their marketing campaigns, M. Night Shyamalan would be sitting pretty. The trailers for his films are invariably intriguing. The writer-director whose works range from the sublime The Sixth Sense to the opposite-of-sublime The Happening has an indisputable gift for high concepts perfect for elevator pitches. And since Shyamalan has been…

  • Definitely, Maybe (2008)

    It’s never too early to romanticize the past, particularly when it involves affairs of the heart. Amid today’s app-friendly hookups, where a potential relationship is a mere swipe right away, perhaps it is inevitable that a romantic comedy like Definitely, Maybe would turn to the not-so-distant and ostensibly simpler 1990s, back when the Internet was…

  • Force Majeure (2014)

    Early in Force Majeure, a young, good-looking family – father, mother, son and daughter – is enjoying a leisurely outdoor lunch at a ski resort in the French Alps. The vista, a gleaming and snow-packed mountain, is spectacular. A controlled explosion in the distance triggers an avalanche that commands the attention of the restaurant patrons, including…

  • The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989)

    When you have real-life brothers portraying brothers, you’re bound to elicit some interesting dynamics. That’s the case with The Fabulous Baker Boys. A modest box-office success upon its 1989 theatrical release, it chiefly earned raves at the time for a memorable star turn by Michelle Pfeiffer. But the movie holds up, thanks to its richly drawn…

  • Hugo (2011)

    Given Martin Scorsese’s prodigious love of film, it is hardly surprising that he made a mash note to the medium that has so dominated his life. To some extent, Scorsese’s entire catalog has been a love letter to movies, immersed as he is in the singular possibilities of cinema. What is unexpected, however, is that…

  • The Last Detail (1973)

    There is no doubt that screenwriter extraordinaire Robert Towne wrote The Last Detail with his friend Jack Nicholson in mind. As 1st Class Signalman Billy “Badass” Buddosky, one of two Navy lifers tasked with escorting a young midshipman to the brig, Nicholson was gifted with a meaty role that enabled him to demonstrate his full…

  • Michael Clayton (2007)

    Critics swooned when Michael Clayton hit theaters in the fall of 2007, and rightly so. Here was the sort of legal thriller, went the conventional wisdom, that John Grisham movies always promise to be but rarely are: Smart, complex, suspenseful. The collective fawning was more than justified. Michael Clayton is just about pitch perfect, an…