American Buffalo

I’ll admit I’m conflicted about David Mamet. He has scripted some movies that I thought were really good (though I wasn’t as taken by Glengarry Glen Ross as a lot of others were), but his dialogue can drive you a little bit crazy. Then you add in his 2008 conversion to the most insane conservative positions, passionately endorsing Mitt Romney, in favor of ... Read more »

The American Friend

The last of the four Ripley movies we set out to see (Ripley Under Ground was filmed in 2005 with Barry Pepper, but it’s not available on video). Directed by Wim Wenders, who’s usually pretty good, but this one is a mess. For one thing, Ripley is barely in it until the ... Read more »

American Gangster

I guess my main complaint about this is stylistic. How dark and murky can a movie get before you don’t have any idea what’s going on? Many directors have been exploring this question in recent years, and here Ridley Scott, who’s always been dark, almost achieves nirvana in some scenes: a completely black screen. In every indoor scene where it is possible, he ... Read more »

American Gigolo

Opening note: This film was produced by my friend the late Freddie Fields, famous mostly for being a Hollywood Super Agent to people like Judy Garland. He worked with just about everybody in Hollywood, including Redford, Monroe, Gibson, Gere, McQueen, and Woody Allen. He was married to Polly Bergen, and then to a former Miss Universe (I hadn’t known that; if I had I’d have angled an ... Read more »

An American Haunting

It is barely possible that this movie is better than I experienced it, because this was the night of the most disastrous election in American history. We were switching back and forth because we couldn’t bear to watch the results unfold. But I don’t think so. It’s pretty lame, almost devoid of scares. But again … maybe it was the fact that the horror in the real world that night was so ... Read more »

American Hustle

So now we’ve seen another of the nine films nominated for Best Picture, and this one’s a doozy. I still believe {{Gravity} should have won, but in another year this one would have been a worthy winner.

It was originally titled American Bullshit, and was apparently a pretty accurate re-creation of the whole Abscam business from the early ‘80s. David O. ... Read more »

An American in Paris

Leslie Caron got her very tardy and long-deserved star on Hollywood Boulevard today (12/8/09), so we were inspired to watch her debut film again. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, but it’s a bunch. In many respects it could qualify as the best Hollywood musical ever made. But so could Read more »

American Movie

This is the chronicle of the creation of what might be the worst film ever made: Coven, by Mark Borchardt. (Pronounced COVE-en, so it won’t rhyme with oven, for reasons known only to the director.) Borchardt is a loser in ... Read more »

American Sniper

What I’d like to do first is review this as just a movie, a war movie, without all the baggage it has gathered. The right embraced it, the left condemned it, which made the right embrace it even more. (As always, the best way to get people to buy something is to tell them it’s not good for them, and they shouldn’t like it. I’m sure Clint Eastwood was delighted with every attack on this ... Read more »

American Splendor

The quite amusing story of Harvey Pekar, the file clerk whose life was turned into a comic book by a series of underground artists, among them R. Crumb. It’s as unlikely as a story can get, and it’s all true. Recommended. Not by me. Harvey Pekar is an obnoxious ... Read more »