AltWeeklies Wire
Losing to Japan: Kiarostami Falters
...no filmmaker is above making errors of judgment. Kiarostami makes a big one.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
02-18-2013 |
Reviews
Breaking Soap — Southern Gothic Teen Romance Goes Camp
An imaginative adolescent gothic romance, “Beautiful Creatures” arrives with considerably more camp and intellectual humor than the “Twilight” franchise to which “Creatures” is sure to be compared.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
02-11-2013 |
Reviews
Agit-Flop: Pablo Larrain’s Pinochet Trilogy Loses Substance
Gael Garcia Bernal’s television adman-turned-political-commercial-creator Rene Saavedra is such an ethically ambiguous and passive protagonist that “No” falls flat as a piece of wannabe agitprop cinema.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
02-11-2013 |
Reviews
Tags: No
Vindicating Charlie Sheen: It Still Hasn’t Happened
Roman Coppola’s '70s-era scattershot comic apologia for Charlie Sheen’s sins of womanizing and drug abuse has a train-wreck appeal that makes it moderately interesting to look at —i.e., a snapshot of our times as seen through a retro view.
City Pulse |
By Cole Smithey |
02-11-2013 |
Reviews
Bumpy Road Movie: Melissa McCarthy Packs a Throat-Punch
2013 is Melissa McCarthy’s year. The plus-size actress who blew up big laughs in “Bridesmaids” is making major comic waves with at least three features tailored to her fast-twitch style of physical humor this year.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
02-05-2013 |
Reviews
Soderbergh’s Swan Song Big Pharma as the Ultimate MacGuffin
Steven Soderbergh’s last feature before his retirement from the movies (he'll still do theater and TV) is a milestone psychological thriller comparable to Hitchcock’s best work.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
02-04-2013 |
Reviews
Cole Smithey Predicts the 2013 Oscars
Ah, the glorious flaws of democracy! As a film critic, I learned long ago to abandon any sense of personal investment in the conclusions drawn by Academy Award voters about the most deserving participants in the seventh arts.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
02-04-2013 |
Movies
Cole Smithey Predicts the 2013 Oscars
Ah the glorious flaws of democracy. As a film critic, I learned long ago to abandon any sense of personal investment in the conclusions drawn by Academy Award voters about the most deserving participants in the seventh arts.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
01-22-2013 |
Movies
Mother Monster: Freaky Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Frightening
Guillermo del Toro — the director of such minor masterpieces as “The Devil’s Backbone” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” — weakens his sphere of influence by producing a sorely underdeveloped horror movie that manufactures scares from the crudest of tropes.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
01-15-2013 |
Reviews
Oh the Agony They Don’t Call it “Les Mis” for Nothing
Audiences new to Boubil & Schoenberg’s stage musical — based on Victor Hugo’s novel of historical fiction — may be surprised to discover the wooly narrative isn’t as compelling as they imagined it might be.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
12-13-2012 |
Reviews
Collateral Damage: Kathryn Bigelow Tows the Party Line, Mostly
Kathryn Bigelow’s cinematic version of the U.S. military’s absurdly protracted ten-year hunt for Osama bin Laden is not what you would expect.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
12-13-2012 |
Reviews
Apatow’s Complaint: Midlife Crisis is a Bundle of Laughs
Three years is too long to go without a Judd Apatow comedy. That’s how long it’s been since the comic genius of American cinema gave us his last written-and-directed movie (“Funny People”).
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
12-13-2012 |
Reviews
Limits of Respect: Massaging FDR Pays Modest Dividends
If only we could see Bill Murray’s FDR hanging out with Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln, then there might be…well, another mediocre life-slice movie about dead presidents.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
12-03-2012 |
Reviews
Bankers’ Penalty Andrew Dominik’s One-Movie Revolution Comes Calling
One of the ten best films of 2012, Andrew Dominik’s cold-blooded satire of American corporate-political-capitalism cuts through its subject like a freshly sharpened guillotine blade.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
11-26-2012 |
Reviews
Seeking Justice: Ken Burns Takes One for the Team
It’s tempting to think that gross miscarriages of justice are less likely to occur in big cities, where police and judicial oversight are theoretically more prevalent than small insular towns — like Memphis for example.
City Pulse |
Cole Smithey |
11-20-2012 |
Movies
