Screening Room
May 6, 2011
Will Ferrell Channels Raymond Carver — And It Works! 12
by Bill Morris
The 10th Tribeca Film Festival was a richly musical affair. Nearly lost in this pleasing din were two quiet movies, a feature and a documentary, that grew, respectively, out of a work of literature and the misguided urge to lionize writers.
May 5, 2011
Missing Roger Lodge 1
by Pete Croatto
All “on-the-scene: dating shows share similar qualities: the couples have never met before and volatile reactions and hot tub canoodling are encouraged.
April 15, 2011
Friday Night Lights, The Final Season: Join the Team 15
by Sonya Chung
What has surprised – and in a way instructed – me most is how effectively FNL employs what is essentially formulaic drama; that is, how aware we are of being immersed in a constructed moral universe, and yet how little the drama’s predictability compromises either one’s engagement or the show’s objective artfulness and excellence.
February 16, 2011
On Race, Class and the Hollywood ‘Whiteout’ 19
by Emily Colette Wilkinson
What we need are more serious movies with multiracial characters/casts that aren’t SCARE QUOTES MOVIES ABOUT RACE END SCARE QUOTES. We need more movies that simultaneously are and aren’t about race: movies that are dramas and comedies, about love, death, the usual human plots—and also happen to be about race.
December 31, 2010
2010 in Film: Girls With Grit 5
by Emily Colette Wilkinson
The year in film offered a critical mass of girls on fire: self-possessed, irrepressible young female characters played by self-possessed, irrepressible young female actors—girls, as Huck Finn would say, “just full of sand.”
December 28, 2010
Will You Beat Hagiographers Please Be Quiet, Please? 11
by Bill Morris
The army of Beat hagiographers operates under the illusion that dissecting the personal lives of writers is essential to – even preferable to – understanding their writing.
