The spotlight clicks on and glares down onto your face, immediately creating sweat beads along your hairline. Your music cues up, and your heart beats in your ears. You take one last breath before that final intro eight-count, and then you’re off. Like you’ve practiced so many times before, your feet move solidly and confidently, […]
Black Swan
Posted inArts & Culture
Shallow pals
And if you want your film to withstand the test of time, don’t be tempted to include of-the-moment pop-culture crazes like, say, a flash mob. “Friends with Benefits,” an otherwise springy rom-com, is saddled with two flash mob scenes, an unfortunate turn given how that phenomenon is already taking on the whiff of Macarena rot. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Blue Valentine
Williams didn’t have a chance, really, but in another year, amid a different set of nominees, things might be different. The same shift in luck applies to the couple that comprises this film’s core: one year, blissful; another, miserable. Cindy (Williams) is a nurse, while her husband, Dean (Ryan Gosling, “Lars and the Real Girl”), […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mesrine: Killer Instinct
But in the films he makes back home in his native France, he can be such a bad-ass, perhaps never more so than in the title role of “Mesrine: Killer Instinct,” the first in a pair of biopics on French gangster Jacques Mesrine, who died in 1979. (The sequel, “Mesrine: Public Enemy #1,” follows in […]