Film
A gorgeous documentary examines the 1990 heist of priceless art from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. By Betsy Sherman It must be hard to decide at what point to undertake a documentary about an ongoing investigation. What if events conspire to make the film you’ve shot seem half-baked, or even irrelevant? Rebecca Dreyfus’ “Stolen,” about…
By Adrienne LaFrance Picture an alternate 2006 in which the internet slave trade in America is an integral part of the economy, only white men have the right to vote, and culture is devoid of jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and countless other things. Head to Fenway and you’ll hear the national anthem, “Dixie,” played before…
Full disclosure: my mother died of lung cancer, brought on by a decades-long addiction to the product satirized in the new film “Thank You for Smoking,” directed by Jason Reitman (son of Ivan Reitman) from a novel by Christopher Buckley (son of William F. Buckley). So maybe I’m not the right person to be reviewing…
Two new films explore the provocative premise that slavery in America didn’t end after the Civil War.
By Thomas Garvey Michael Haneke may be the only living director who really matters, but you might not guess that from “Cache” (“Hidden”), the new film that has finally brought the brilliant Austrian auteur some serious media attention. It’s far easier, actually, to guess from “Cache” why he’s suddenly a press darling: the film treats…
Woody Allen’s big comeback? His best work in a decade? Genius rivaling “Annie Hall”!? What potent, absorbing, and thoroughly compelling version of “Match Point” were these critics watching? Look, it’s set in London, not New York! Listen, that crackling soundtrack is opera, not jazz! And wait a minute, there is no would-be Woody character in…
Woody Allen’s freshest and most potent film in years manages to be much more than an erotic thriller. By Betsy Sherman Woody Allen’s cinema of the past 10 years has been one of quaint fetishes. True, his passion for early jazz resulted in the hilarious “Sweet and Lowdown,” but aside from that movie and the…
I enjoyed the movie —- critics from outside the dance world have found Ballet Russes charming, too — but the filmmakers’ real gifts are the oral histories that they collected from these dancers just before it was too late.
The Floundering State of Film Criticism
Ana Rivas sent in this piece on a recent confab at Boston University featuring two film critics – Renata Adler, who for a short time in the ’60s was a film critic for The New York Times and A.O. Scott, who is the current chief film critic for the paper. The conversation contained some interesting…
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