Flicks don’t get any more testicular than 1999’s The Boondock Saints, a Beantown-flavored slab of Tarantino attitude that emerged as a minor cult hit. The sequel, with the marquee-hogging title…
Bob Cashill
I first saw Michael Sheen in his native England, in a 1999 National Theatre revival of John Osborne’s ”angry young man” play Look Back in Anger. I’d heard that he…
The Wizard of Oz has influenced every movie made since it opened in 1939, or so I’ve read. Off the top of my head I’m not so sure: On the…
One of the few upsets at this year’s tepid Academy Awards was Precious beating Up in the Air for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film had won scripting awards from the…
Note to self: Sentiment outranks everything else when picking a Best Foreign Language Film winner in the Oscar pool. I’m not-so-secretly pleased that the stone-cold, auteurist-approved White Ribbon didn’t blue-ribbon…
The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) paired Jackie Chan and Jet Li in the nick of time. Two years later 55-year-old Chan is playing the Mr. Miyagi part in the Karate Kid…
Almost three years ago to the day I posted on my blog an open letter to my long-time crush object Sandra Bullock. The news was not good. Read on… Dear…
”Film culture today,” I muttered, as I waded through (and into) an unusually bothersome post on the usually half-annoying (but compulsively readable) Hollywood Elsewhere site. Look: It’s OK not to…
The documentarian who co-produced The War Room enters the battlefield of fashion with Vogue editor Anna (“Nuclear”) Wintour in The September Issue, out on DVD.
I have a Clint Eastwood problem. But a new mega-set of his movies, Clint Eastwood: 35 Films 35 Years at Warner Bros., obliges me to take the long view. This…
Solid craftsmanship disguises some rickety timber in The House of the Devil. Writer/director/editor Ti West says in one of the DVD’s two commentary tracks that he had Polanski and Kubrick…
Roberto Rossellini’s status as a father of neorealism is eclipsed by his notoriety as the father of Isabella Rossellini. His adulterous affair with Ingrid Bergman in the 50s touched off…
“It doesn’t get any easier trying to bring these characters to life,” says the star of the Oscar-nominated Coen brothers film, out now on DVD.
From Avatar to the Transformers sequel, from Up in the Air to the depths of Obsessed, a look back at the highs and lows of 2009 as awards season takes shape.
1984 was a great year for foreign-language and independent cinema in the U.S. Off the top of my head I can recall seeing the following at Chicago’s Fine Arts Theater,…
If the Oscars are truly serious about slimming down the Academy should just mail Christoph Waltz and Mo’Nique their supporting performer awards. Or hand them over at next Tuesday’s nominations…
Giant insects were all the rage in the nuclear-obsessed 50s—the king-sized ants of Them! (1954) led to an all-out assault of creepy-crawlies, with Tarantula (1955), The Black Scorpion (1957), The…
You’d think that with all the miracles that CGI is capable of someone in Hollywood would figure out what to do with Bruce Willis’ hair. In Surrogates, out today on…
By the early 80s Robert Altman was at an impasse in Hollywood. The success of MASH (1970) and Nashville (1975) was mitigated by numerous critical and/or financial flops, including Quintet…
Over the holidays I read Robert Sellers’ Hellraisers, whose subtitle, ”The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and Oliver Reed” pretty much tells you what…
Some stage plays and musicals are adapted into films. Others are simply filmed. That would seem to be the easier gig—but if you’ve suffered through one where the camera never…
The received wisdom was that the even-numbered entries in the pre-reboot Star Trek series were better than the odd-numbered ones. That held up, too, until the 10th and final one…
I reviewed The Hangover when it was a big hit in June, then watched as it snowballed into a phenomenon. It’s the fourth top-grossing movie of 2009 to date and…
As the decade draws to a close, the Popdose staff looks back at its favorite films of the last 10 years.
Someone at Columbia Pictures has it in for us. Besides the demolition derby of 2012 the studio also recently released the end-of-the-Earth horror comedy Zombieland and Angels & Demons, whose…
The Criterion Collection has an agreement with IFC Films to put some of its more noteworthy acquisitions on DVD, and so we have Matteo Garrone’s outstanding Gomorrah. I reviewed the…
Thanksgiving: For some, that time of the year to reconnect with friends and family, to eat plenty of turkey and trimmings, and figure out what to gift Aunt Ida with…
After a more than a decade in Hollywood 33-year-old Robert Redford broke through as a major star in 1969’s smash hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But he had…
The extras-rich Criterion Collection version of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987) is perfectly timed to seize the moment. The subject of the film is dividing lines—between fallible humans and…
Critics have split over The Men Who Stare at Goats — some find it an amusing military satire, while others reject it as unfunny mush. Which side is Bob Cashill on?