Badland, a melodrama by the writer and director Francesco Lucente, stands apart from the recent throng of post-9/11 dramas by posing a burning question we haven't heard yet: Can a mentally ill Iraq war veteran who murdered his pregnant wife and two of his children learn how to love again?

To read the review, click here.

By Matt Zoller SeitzBecause the movie covers well-worn territory—and interviews the usual boldface names, including the assassination theorists Mark Lane and Edward Jay Epstein, the former CBS beat reporter Dan Rather and Norman Mailer—its existence raises a question: Why go here again?

By Keith Uhlich

There's much more wrong than right with The Savages, an off-putting entry in the daddy's-dyin'-who's-got-the-will (the emotion, not the document) genre from Slums of Beverly Hills writer/director Tamara Jenkins. The strained magical-realist prologue, wherein numerous elder residents of the Sun City, Arizona retirement community emerge from behind perfectly trimmed shrubbery (shades of Edward Scissorhands) to the tinkle of a precious, quirk-infused score (for his work here, composer Stephen Trask should be violently beaten upside the head with his marimbas), is the first red-alert warning sign that we're in for a long hour-fifty three. That the sequence concludes with the dementia-afflicted Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) writing "prick" on the bathroom wall with his own shit only deepens the sinking sensation finally hammered home by the answering machine greeting, crooned by All About Eve's Margo Channing (Bette Davis), which taunts each and every caller to the run-down Manhattan abode of Lenny's daughter Wendy (Laura Linney): "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night."

Indeed. Continue Reading »

The fall season of 2007 has produced four films that challenge how we understand the genre of the Western. In September, we had James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma and Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Here in November we have the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men. The end of the year will see the release of P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood.

The Mangold picture is perhaps the most earnest of the four, taking up the genre as something to be applied to a story: the genre as a cycle. Dominik's picture, while rooted in the 19th century, attempts to inherit the genre as a medium for its recurring tropes and themes, but the film falters under its own weight and has less to say about Westerns than it does about celebrity culture. The Coens break from the 19th century in explicit terms—their film is set in 1980—but their inheritance of the tradition of "local color" writers (like Twain or Cooper) helps ground one's understanding of No Country For Old Men as a Western. There Will Be Blood bridges the 19th and 20th centuries in its opening 10 minutes, eclipsing the reliance on the designated past one often (misguidedly) associates with the Western, but its obsessions with frontiers, isolation and the American myth of perfectionism may help us to better understand how I want to characterize what a Western is today—or, how the Western genre may still be viable, and more alive than we think—as best as time and space allow.

To read the rest of the review at The Daily Californian, click here.

[Editor's warning: Spoilers abound.] Continue Reading »