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Beginning this week at the Pacific Film Archive, a series highlighting the career of French actress Jeanne Moreau, whom director Orson Welles once called “the greatest actress in the world,” will run until December 11. The series kicks off tonight, Thursday, November 3, with “Bay of Angels,” a 1962 film
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When Andrew Niccol christened “In Time” “‘Gattaca’ revisited,” my head filled with all sorts of fantasies about what a mind-bending concept, beautiful megastar cast, and Niccol’s script could do in 2011. With special effects and high-impact actors, the potential of sci-fi thrillers to suck in the viewer and create an
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In a hotel suite ravaged by what apparently must have either been a night of debauchery or a serial killer’s last murder, San Juan Star reporter Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) wakes in a half-dead, half-drunken stupor. Hijinks ensue. A little later, Kemp and his colleague/roommate Bob Sales (Michael Rispoli) are
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Director Roland Emmerich should be an expert in disaster movies by now. For over 10 years, he’s been the prophet of doom behind such apocalyptic hits as “Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow” and that crowning homage to the end of times, “2012.” Only now, he’s moved away from future
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Jeff Warrick’s “Programming the Nation?” tiresomely rehashes a potentially fascinating topic: subliminal messaging in mass media. With an obvious left-wing bias and an overambitious scope — covering everything from subliminal techniques in advertising, film and music, to those in political propaganda and more — the film fails to provide any
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A fog of dreams and delusions, light and dark, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” is a movie to go mad by. It is a decidedly anti-narrative mood piece, frustrating to navigate and, like the title, easy to trip up on. The first viewing, the pure experience, is hazy and tantalizing, and
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David Lynch, when told “Blue Velvet” had no subtext, that everything was in plain sight and on the surface, responded “It’s all there, yeah,” and laughed. This statement derived from critics’ belief that filmmakers, in a postmodern showing-of-the-hand, were suddenly doing all the work for them: the theory, the interpretation,
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“Scenes of a Crime” Scenes of a Crime” is a portrait of the grotesque underbelly of the American justice system. Wait. That is inaccurate. The film takes the stance that it is hardly a “just” system if innocent citizens are sent to jail on the basis of false confessions, extracted
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This “Thing” has survived three cinematic reincarnations, and there could be more I don’t know about. What begins as the short story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell Jr. becomes “The Thing From Another World” (1951), which is B-horror bliss. Then John Carpenter directs “The Thing” (1982), with that
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“The Hero’s Journey” is one of Joseph Campbell’s most famous publications and pioneering concepts, an exploration into the foundations for all mythological storytelling. In his new film “Finding Joe,” Director Patrick Takaya Solomon manages to lazily and ineffectively explore the idea of the archetypal hero. Solomon presents the concept as
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