Mike D'Angelo
Story Archive
-
ReviewsMaking the commonplace seem fresh
Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009 David has a wee secret, and if you can't figure it out, you badly need an education of your own.
-
FilmThe Men Who Stare at Goats
Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2009 The story of an elite unit of soldiers armed with psychic powers was plenty nutty on its own—playing it for broad laughs in "The Men Who Stared at Goats" only renders it surprisingly toothless.
-
-
ReviewsAmelia
Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009 Amelia Earhart was a woman in a male-dominated field, and Amelia beats that fact into the ground until it coughs up blood.
-
ScreenThe Stepfather
Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009 The 1987’s low-budget sleeper The Stepfather has long been championed as an uncommonly intelligent thriller, though it’d really be more accurate to call it primo schlock.
-
ReviewsWhere the emo things are
Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009 Spike Jonze turns a children’s classic into a twee indie-rock lyric.
-
FilmBright Star
Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2009 Here’s the deal: Either you’re the kind of person who’s going to get excited by a movie about the chaste romance between 19th-century poet John Keats and the love of his life, Fanny Brawne, or you’re not. If you are, keep reading.
-
ScreenLove, Michael Moore-style
Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2009 If there are two people I never want to see in a motion picture again, they are Michael Moore and some poor, low-paid security guard who is just trying to do his/her goddamn job.
-
FilmGroovy nonsense
Thursday, Sept. 17, 2009 Steven Soderbergh transforms corporate malfeasance into zany comedy with The Informant!
-
FilmHomicide
Thursday, Sept. 17, 2009 Long unavailable on home video, David Mamet’s 1991 film Homicide remains the most weirdly personal work he’s written directly for the screen, and still ranks among his finest.
-
FilmJulia
Thursday, Sept. 3, 2009 Easily one of the best films to be released this year—albeit not in Las Vegas—Julia finds perpetually cool Oscar-winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton) taking a flamethrower to her image.
-
FilmAng Lee’s lamest movie ever
Thursday, Aug. 27, 2009 It was inevitable, I suppose, that Ang Lee would eventually get around to the historical docudrama—or, as I’ve recently dubbed that generally useless collection of bullet-point factoids, the Wiki-movie. Enter Taking Woodstock.
-
FilmDisappointing Basterds
Thursday, Aug. 20, 2009 While Tarantino spent the better part of a decade describing this project as his version of The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone—a badass, action-heavy, dudes-on-a-mission war flick - he’s actually made ... well, a Tarantino movie.
-
FilmA Tarantino fave: The 5 Deadly Venom
Thursday, Aug. 20, 2009 Chang Cheh’s The 5 Deadly Venoms (1978) boasted a concept so memorable that it was even parodied in the animated Kung Fu Panda.
-
FilmBlunt but effective allegory, with aliens
Thursday, Aug. 13, 2009 Structured as a fake documentary, a city-sized spacecraft mysteriously stalled 20 years ago Its starving, frightened occupants, who resemble huge bipedal prawns, were evacuated by humanity and given what was meant to be temporary shelter in a hastily constructed shantytown.
-
FilmDVD Spotlight: Repulsion
Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009 Few films have depicted the descent into madness with as much sheer nightmarish brio as Roman Polanski’s 1965 Repulsion.
-
FilmIntimate yet grandiose
Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009 Francis Ford Coppola capitalizes on his freedom to indulge himself with Tetro
-
FilmStaring into the void
Thursday, July 30, 2009 Funny People finds longtime pal Judd Apatow teasing us with the notion of the “real” Adam Sandler. It’s a commendably dark portrait in many ways, but even in the guise of an unregenerate asshole, Sandler gives the camera absolutely nothing. He’s a contemptuous void.
-
FilmHurt’s so good ... until it isn’t
Thursday, July 23, 2009 Ever since last year’s Venice Film Festival, where Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker had its world premiere, many critics have proclaimed it to be the first genuinely great movie about the war in Iraq.
-
FilmO’Horten
Thursday, July 16, 2009 One of the most reliable crowd-pleasers, in multiplexes and arthouses alike, is the tale of the long-suffering conformist who finally cuts loose and embarks upon a series of whimsical adventures.
-
FilmOddly uncomfortable
Thursday, July 9, 2009 Before the first reel is over, Brüno assaults viewers—and given the country’s collective sensibility, “assault” is really the only possible word—with a Benny Hill-style cavalcade of extreme gay sex acts.
-
FilmEasy Virtue
Thursday, June 18, 2009 Jessica Biel plays Larita, an American race-car driver and divorcée who’s just married into a highly starched English family and must do brittle battle with her new mother-in-law and other snooty relations.
-
FilmAdoration
Thursday, June 18, 2009 Tom Egoyan may be the only filmmaker in the world who would go to the trouble of inventing fictional technology for a movie that couldn’t even remotely be considered science fiction.
-
FilmRudo y Cursi
Thursday, June 4, 2009 Y Tu Mamá También's power duo of Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna are back together, this time under the direction of Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón's brother, Carlos.
-
FilmNot trashy enough
Thursday, May 14, 2009 Trashy airport novels frequently make better movies than do works of serious literature, oddly enough. So you’d think that Dan Brown’s atrociously written—and yet compulsively readable—tales would make hugely entertaining Hollywood fluff. Bzzt.
-
-
FilmDuller than fiction
Thursday, April 23, 2009 Movies based on true stories generally like to trumpet their real-world bona fides right at the outset, so that we’ll be properly amazed as the remarkable events unfold.
-
ReviewsGomorrah
Thursday, April 16, 2009 From goofy teenage Tony Montana wannabes firing automatic weapons in their underwear, to the murderous muscle necessary to fashion a red carpet gown, nothing is overlooked or sensationalized in Gomorrah.
-
FilmMore sad than funny
Thursday, April 9, 2009 Hollywood comedies don’t generally require keystones, but Observe and Report—a film so stubborn and bizarre that it might more accurately be termed an anti-comedy—goes the extra mile.
-
FilmAdventureland
Thursday, April 2, 2009 No doubt the title is intended ironically, but still—pretty much the last word you’d ever use to describe Adventureland would be “adventurous.”
-
FilmFrom a distance
Thursday, March 19, 2009 As movies with no compelling reason to exist go, Che is really quite good.
-
FilmKnowing
Thursday, March 19, 2009 Schoolkids are asked to draw their visions of the future; their efforts are then sealed into a time capsule to be opened 50 years hence.
-
FilmThe Class
Thursday, March 19, 2009 Director Cantet observes the teacher-student dynamic with such probing patience that you can’t help but get emotionally involved in the struggle.
-
FilmTwo Lovers
Thursday, March 5, 2009 Suicidally depressed after a broken engagement, Leonard Kraditor (Phoenix) finds himself torn between the titular beauties, feelin’ like a fool.
-
FilmA rotten combo
Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009 Waltz With Bashir has accomplished a remarkable film-ghetto hat trick, being simultaneously one of last year’s most acclaimed foreign films, one of its most celebrated documentaries and one of its most notable animated features.
-
FilmFired Up
Thursday, Feb. 19, 2009 Loud, aggressive, desperately ribald and pathetically unfunny, Fired Up lives down to every expectation you might have for a film produced under the aegis of Maxim magazine.
-
FilmDon’t bank on it
Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009 Action thrillers are inherently preposterous, of course, but there’s a limit to what we’ll swallow.
-
FilmHe’s Just Not That Into You
Thursday, Feb. 5, 2009 A bitchy, tough-love self-help tome, He’s Just Not That Into You offers advice so blatantly obvious that the entire book can be condensed into a single sentence: If you have any doubt whatsoever about whether a guy really likes you, he doesn’t.
-
FilmStupid yet watchable
Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009 Arriving on U.S. screens nearly a full year after it opened in Europe, Taken, the latest hyperviolent potboiler produced and co-written by slick action ace Luc Besson (the Transporter series), feels even more retrograde and anachronistic than that delay might suggest.
-
ReviewsInkheart
Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009 Like most fantasy-adventure stories, Inkheart, adapted from German author Cornelia Funke’s popular series of children’s books, strives to conjure up a long-forgotten world.
-
FilmNot exactly "Revolutionary"
Thursday, Jan. 15, 2009 Revolutionary Road opens with two scenes so beautifully judged—so perfect a précis of a marriage in crisis—that they just about render the rest of the film redundant.
-
FilmVeering off-course
Thursday, Jan. 8, 2009 Early in Gran Torino, playing what he’s said may well be his final role, Clint Eastwood growls. I mean that quite literally.
-
Film2008 in movies: A critical dialogue between Mike D'Angelo and Josh Bell
Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008 Two Weekly critics discuss the year in films.
-
ReviewsDoubt
Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008 Once upon a time, a movie set amongst priests and nuns and portentously titled Doubt might have concerned a crisis of faith. These days, however, another cause for uncertainty springs immediately to mind.
-
ReviewsThe Spirit
Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008 At one point, for no good reason, Mendes’ sultry jewel thief photocopies her own ass. That’s this movie in a nutshell.
-
ReviewsA low-stakes showdown
Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008 Frost/Nixon is just an entertaining clash of two oversized egos, and that’s fine by me. Just so long as 30 years from now we aren’t obliged to endure the distaff sequel: Couric/Palin.
-
Film
It’s not you, it’s us
Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008 Slumdog Millionaire arrives in local theaters riding a veritable tsunami of audience goodwill, to say nothing of its status as the current frontrunner for Best Picture at next year’s Oscars. People genuinely seem to love it. All I can do, really, is try my best to explain why I did not.
-
FilmMoving forward but standing still
Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008 The Day the Earth Stood Still, which in 1951 spoke to the nation’s anxiety about the terrible power of nuclear fission, has now gone green.
-
FilmMilquetoast Milk
Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008 Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant, sticks fast to moldy biopic convention and features Academy Award-winner Sean Penn as doomed San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to win elected office.
-
ReviewsAshes of Time Redux
Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008 Six years before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon introduced wuxia (the Chinese chivalry/swordplay genre) to a large American audience, Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai set out to create a particularly ambitious and singular example of the form.
