By Armond White The secular tendency that dominates today’s movies makes the spiritual inquiry in The Gardener (showing at The Quad) even more remarkable. It is the bold new film by one of the great international moviemakers, Iran’s Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who typically, transcends genre; here mixing the religious feeling of …
By Armond White Hard luck Lindsay Lohan couldn’t have made a worse movie than The Canyons had she directed it herself. As the film’s producer, she made the poor decision to hire Paul Schrader as director, putting herself in the hands of a filmmaker who reduces her to a T&A …
By Armond White As I sat down at the AMC Empire Cinemas in Times Square for that evening’s all-media screening, I could smell a dead rat–and then The Wolverine confirmed it. It wasn’t the first time that an all-media screening took place in that filthy, Crossroads-of-Consumerism flea pit (very recently …
By Armond White Cate Blanchett’s singularly obnoxious character in Blue Jasmine blocks our empathy. First because she’s such a phony–having changed her name from the mundane Jeanette to the pretentious Jasmine (“My mother’s favorite flower”), next because she embodies superciliousness (comically indifferent to everyone’s interest besides her own love of …
Only God Forgives is a decadent drag act Ryan Gosling plays DiCaprio to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Scorsese–acting out an adolescent idea of manliness in Drive and now Only God Forgives. But sulky Gosling lacks DiCaprio’s hammy brio just as Refn lacks Scorsese’s flamboyance, so he mopes and broods; practicing a …
By Armond White Whatever else is going on in Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess (now playing at Film Forum), it is also–unmistakably–a satire on film culture’s extinction. The weird weekend gathering of chess and computer geeks at an early 80s conference (they’re testing whether a machine can outplay a human being) …
Why Kanye West’s New Slaves matters as cinema By Armond White Performance Art is dead. At least it felt that way until Kanye West’s New Slaves–an in situ projection that played in 66 cities around the world. Kanye’s single-take recitation of his song “New Slaves” stared back at its spectators, …
By Armond White Two visions of America compete in Grown Ups 2 and Pawn Shop Chronicles–each different, each impressive. Adam Sandler’s follow-up to his 2010 hit continues the celebration of friendship and community while director Wayne Kramer’s film confronts the hostility and hysteria that define the era’s dissatisfaction. Both movies …
By Armond White After Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel brought visual ingenuity, emotion and moral gravity to the sci-fi spectacular, it’s hard to settle for over-the-top childishness like Pacific Rim. Director Guillermo del Toro favors frivolous exaggeration–the world under attack by Kaiju, gargantuan sea monsters. Mankind fights back by building …
By Armond White And it was hell tryin’ to bail to the ovaries With nothin’ but the Lord lookin’ over me I was white with a tail But when I reached the Finish Line— YOUNG BLACK MALE! –Ice Cube’s “The Product” Young Black males rarely get such a smoothly beautiful …
