DECEMBER 3

Black Swan
DW: It’s a little surprising, but not unwelcome, to see an American writer and director make a film that looks and seems so much like a European thriller. I’m happy with this, as my taste in the genre veers more towards the stylized approach and psychological themes of the European thrillers than the violent and gruesome approach that seems to be dominant in the American approach. Portman has been getting a lot of praise for her role as a repressed ballerina who can’t quite rise to the demands of her …

November! The leaves are turning, the air is chilling, and the last of the Halloween cash-in movies are wrapping up their time in our movie theaters and we’re making way for one of the two most profitable movie-going days of the year: Thanksgiving. Here we have a grab bag of stuff the studios hold in good esteem: high-profile comedies, sci-fi epics, high-octane action flicks, the beginning of the end of a major franchise, and a new Disney princess film.
Bureau Chiefs Ken Lowery and Dorian Wright take a look at what …

October’s here, which means the trailers for the winter’s Oscar bait are making their premieres and cheapie scary movies are released upon the teenaged public — complete with a new Saw installment. September was mostly a pretty grim month for movies, but October promises something a bit better: A wider mix of good talent and subject matter, from high brow to low.
OCTOBER 1

Let Me In
DW: At the best of times, I’m pretty skeptical of both vampire films and of remakes of horror films. The pedigree for this story of a …

And now we tread headlong into the limbo between summer blockbuster season and Oscar season (with a quick stop over in Horror Town in late October). What do September’s offerings have in common? Not a whole lot: there’s some serious highbrow stuff alongside lower-end fare, horror films and biopics and even a bit of Mexploitation.
No, the only thing September’s releases have in common are maddeningly non-specific titles that make it hard to quickly search for relevant images on Google.
SEPTEMBER 1
The American
KL: George Clooney remains one of the true “stars” left …

I have a nostalgic attachment to certain movies I saw in the theater when I was a kid, and for many of those movies, that nostalgia breeds a certain charm which allows me to enjoy the movie when I revisit them as an adult. This does not just include the usual pop culture touchstones that most who grew up in the late ’70s/early ’80s have, like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Superman.
For example, that I grew to film maturity during the heyday of Burt Reynolds–and Burt Reynolds …

The main thing you need to know about John Boorman’s 1974 sci-fi classic, Zardoz, is that, for most of the movie, Sean Connery wears this costume:

I’m glad not only that I live in a world in which Zardoz exists, but also that I live in the world in which the circumstances that allow Zardoz’s existence could happen. That is, the window for Zardoz’s possible existence is only that period in 1974 when it was released: two years after director John Boorman made Deliverance and three years before Star Wars …