Patricia Clarkson

SYNOPSIS
Directed and written by Gerald Peary, Boston Phoenix critic and one-time Acting Curator of the Harvard Film Archive, For the Love of Movies offers a 100-year history of film criticism through clips from Hollywood movies and illuminating, entertaining interviews with many of America’s key reviewers, including Roger Ebert (The Chicago Sun-Times), A.O. Scott (The New York Times), Lisa Schwarzbaum (Entertainment Weekly), Wesley Morris (The Boston Globe), and Harry Knowles (aintitcoolnews.com).Read More »

Quote:
“Wendigo” is a good movie with an ending that doesn’t work. While it was not working I felt a keen disappointment, because the rest of the movie works so well. The writer, director and editor is Larry Fessenden, whose “Habit” (1997) was about a New York college student who found solace, and too much more, in the arms of a vampire. Now Fessenden goes into the Catskills to tell a story that will be compared to “The Blair Witch Project” when it should be compared to “The Innocents.” The film builds considerable scariness, and does it in the details. Ordinary things happen in ominous ways. Kim and George (Patricia Clarkson and Jake Weber), a couple from New York, drive to the Catskills to spend a weekend in a friend’s cottage, bringing along their young son, Miles (Erik Per Sullivan). Even before they arrive, there’s trouble. They run into a deer on the road, and three hunters emerge from the woods and complain that the city people killed “their” deer–and worse, broke its antlers.Read More »

Quote:
Very often films which are defiant of genre categorisation can easily come across as messy and imprecise, but in Ira Sachs’ “Married Life,” he blends dark comedy, suspense and stylish melodrama into a contemporary throwback, conceptualised from a male perspective, to the film noir facet of the glamour of the 40’s in a wholesome package that keeps the viewer on their toes every step of the way. Audiences will either revel in the manner in which the film strays from a singular course or they will find annoyance in the seemingly directionless film, with an insubordinate mixture of tones and principles, in a way that very much resembles reality. What the film does not manage to do is balance its daring concept will an entirely fulfilling outcome, and perhaps “Married Life” is too modest for its own good.Read More »

NY Times website:
“Regarding Susan Sontag,” a documentary Monday night on HBO, will fill you in on a lot of the details of its subject’s life: her precocity, her travels, her illnesses, her lovers. (Particularly her lovers.)

What it won’t give you is any strong sense of her work. The famous essays and collections of criticism and analysis — “Notes on Camp,” “Against Interpretation,” “On Photography,” “Illness as Metaphor” — are used as mile markers, along with the less famous novels and films. But rather than tackle Ms. Sontag’s ideas or their value head-on, the director, Nancy Kates, continually deflects the discussion along other lines: Ms. Sontag as closeted bisexual, serial heartbreaker, liberal provocateur, narcissist, celebrity, camera subject, Jew, cancer survivor.Read More »