Author Archives: Gregory Fichter
This should have been a massive, misguided headache: stranger to subtlety Baz Luhrmann, director of the effervescent musical melodrama Moulin Rouge! and the guns a-blazing version of Romeo & Juliet decides to lend his stylized, campy sensibility to a 3D adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s d...
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Premiering at last year’s Cannes Film Festival in the prestigious vanguard of movies “In Competition,” director Jeff Nichols’ third film, Mud, was surely too modest and commercial to win the Palme d’Or – though the 33-year-old made a splash at the festival in 2011 when his intense dra...
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One would never accuse famed press-shy, prodigal film genius Terrence Malick of being hurried in either his storytelling or his carefully chosen, infrequent projects. Known in shorthand as the young 1970s turk who followed that decade’s downbeat, existential turn in American cinema to its lowes...
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Luke (Ryan Gosling) has the recklessly cool job of motorbike stunt driver in traveling carnivals; back home once again in Schenectady, New York, he finds that he has left behind a one-year-old baby boy with his former fling Romina (Eva Mendes) and sets out to make right by doing wrong in the inti...
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Nervous anticipation usually accompanies the English-language debut film of a prominent international director – the big business of American movie production has too often resulted in a compromised vision and desaturation of the idiosyncratic talents which gained the artist worldwide notice in...
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It has been five years since Bryan Singer’s enjoyable WWII spy thriller Valkyrie, but his lack of directorial output is only due to producer duties on a number of films (the X-Men franchise sees him again at the helm in 2014 after Matthew Vaughan’s exemplary X-Men: First Class) and television...
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While certainly loud, somewhat sexy, and decked out in all the accurate aesthetic trappings of 1930s Los Angeles, Gangster Squad turns out to be merely a dim cousin to sincere works like L.A. Confidential or Michael Mann’s intimate Public Enemies due to a battery of corny, faux-noir line readin...
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Even if it were not for Keira Knightley’s odd facial tics and total lack of intensity, Joe Wright’s lavishly-staged adaptation of Tolstoy’s Russian literature cornerstone Anna Karenina would still play like the tragic romance Oprah Winfrey thought she selected for her book club and made an ...
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To dispense with the obvious, Life of Pi is a technical marvel that seamlessly captures the essential (some would think unfilmable) central story of a young man trapped on a lifeboat in the company of a large Bengal tiger. Yann Martel’s novel struck a chord with this intriguing high concept by ...
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The film opens with a slow-motion reminder of the bodies piled as carrion in the dark final days of the American Civil War; it will be the only moment of strict battlefield action as Steven Spielberg’s intimate, swelling epic Lincoln draws away from the heavily documented toll of the conflict (...
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There may seem to be glut of scary-themed animated movies this fall – we’ve already had ParaNorman and Hotel Transylvania – and now we have Frankenweenie, Tim Burton’s comparably modest addition to a genre he had a significant hand in popularizing (with a hat tip to Rankin-Bass, et al). F...
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