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Film Culture

Step Brothers

Farting sets the standard of good taste
Step Brothers should answer any doubts as to whether Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly are cinema’s reigning lovable losers.

By TOM MEEK | July 23, 2008

Girls Rock!

An irresistable, haphazard jumble
The effort was valiant, but the documentary is often a jumble of haphazardly shot footage, with too many interview bites, and sketchy sequences.

By GERALD PEARY | July 23, 2008

CSNY Déjà Vu

Still rocking in the free world
If some think “four balding hippie millionaires” should just can the politics and play the hits, that’s not how Neil rolls.

By MIKE MILIARD | July 23, 2008

Fearsome Otto

Remembering Preminger
My one brush with the late Otto Preminger seems like a typical encounter.

By GERALD PEARY | May 13, 2008

Paul Sherman’s Big Screen Boston
For peddling some not-for-sale DVDs to a dubious Internet customer, local critic Paul Sherman found himself in the middle of an FBI sting, removed from his reviewing posts at the Boston Herald and the Improper Bostonian , and under voluntary house arrest.

By GERALD PEARY | April 22, 2008

Guerrilla filmmaking

This Is Nollywood opens the African Film Fest
Hollywood begat Bollywood, India’s extraordinary mass-market cinema.

By GERALD PEARY | February 04, 2008

Lost and found

Bruce Weber’s portrait of Chet Baker
Let’s Get Lost is getting a deserved second act, with a restored 35mm print screening at the Brattle Theatre January 25 through February 7.

By GERALD PEARY | January 22, 2008

Rí!

Kings in Gaelic, plus Brattle Staff Picks
In Kings , which is getting six screenings at the MFA, it’s 1977, and six spry Irish lads are sailing toward London, buoyed by grand expectations.

By GERALD PEARY | December 31, 2007

Union dos

The Hollywood writers strike east
Film Culture wanted to check out Boston’s first rally supporting the Writers Guild of America strike to see which New England–based screenwriters would answer the call.

By GERALD PEARY | December 26, 2007

Auteur land?

‘Film Culture’ in 2007
Granted, Sweeney Todd is a grim, violent, misanthropic musical.

By GERALD PEARY | December 17, 2007

Good Evening

And Forever holds its peace
All those Oscar prognosticators, all those Best Picture wagers, and nobody has mentioned, or even noticed, Andrew Wagner’s Starting Out in the Evening .

By GERALD PEARY | December 12, 2007

Moral minority

The Code, plus Strength and Honor
“It’s incorrect to assert that traditional Hollywood films always have happy endings,” film historian Thomas Doherty once noted on a panel I attended.

By GERALD PEARY | December 05, 2007

King and Queens

Romance + Cigarettes , plus Salton Sea
In Romance & Cigarettes , which opens this Friday at the Kendall Square, Gandolfini has been dropped by writer/director John Turturro into drab, treeless, white-ethnic Queens.

By GERALD PEARY | November 28, 2007

Noah’s arc

Baumbach from Squid to Margot
William Faulkner conceived The Sound and the Fury from a mental picture of a pair of women’s underpants dangling on a clothesline.

By GERALD PEARY | November 20, 2007

Heavy casualties

History repeats in De Palma’s Redacted
In 1989, filmmaker Brian De Palma directed the potent Hollywood feature Casualties of War , taking his audience back in time to a vile true-life incident from Vietnam.

By GERALD PEARY | November 13, 2007

Ordure in the court

Barbet Schroeder’s L’avocat de la terreur
“He couldn’t be a terrorist, living in a cellar and eating canned food,” says a perceptive friend of the notorious French attorney Jacques Vergès.

By GERALD PEARY | November 06, 2007