A convoluted tangle of a film, Syriana (2005) is impeccably crafted, challenging and highly political. It skims across the globe, ricocheting from scene to scene and viewpoint to viewpoint, dramatizing the gnarly intersection of corporate greed, government power, and the intelligence world. The linear but highly complex story begins with a merger between two major [...]
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I love movies like The American (2010), international thrillers with brooding, paranoid spy protagonists. Sadly, I didn’t much care for The American itself, which doesn’t really deliver anything new to the genre. George Clooney stars as Jack, an expert assassin-for-hire nearing the end of his career. His idyllic getaway in Sweden is smashed when hitmen [...]
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“More of this is true than you would believe.” So says an early title card for The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009), a quirky comedy about a top secret U.S. military unit dedicated to psychic operations. Journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), after a traumatic break-up, leaves his newspaper job in Michigan to be a [...]
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I either didn’t read Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox or simply don’t remember it, so I had no idea what to expect going into Wes Anderson’s animated film version. Well, except that it would probably be Wes Anderson-like. My guess is that if you like the quirky, low key sense of humor of Anderson’s other [...]
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Every once in a while, a critically acclaimed film comes along that I do want to see. Up in the Air (2009) is an engaging and timely blend of comedy and drama, with a solid grasp on the American zeitgeist of the Great Recession. George Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a deliberately disconnected hatchet man [...]
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I rented The Good German (2006) a couple years ago and it didn’t make a great impression on me at the time, so it was with some trepidation that I rewatched it for this project. I liked it much better this time around, but I can also see why it didn’t entirely win me over [...]
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I reviewed Burn After Reading (2008) here at the site just over a year ago. But in the true spirit of the enterprise — in other words, because I’m kind of an obsessive geek — I just watched it again for Spy 100. My previous review didn’t include a synopsis, so briefly: the story kicks [...]
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Sunday night I watched the latest Coen Brothers film, Burn After Reading (2008), an offbeat and at times hilarious send-up of the paranoid contemporary spy thriller. Yeah, this is my kind of movie! I would venture to say that if you like other Coen Brothers movies, you’ll probably like this one. I found it impeccably [...]
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