Word: writer-director
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...contained "some of the most odious harpies ever collected in one play." It nevertheless became a huge hit, despite the fact that there has never been any reason to question his judgment - not when the 1939 movie version came along, and certainly not now as we cringingly confront writer-director Diane English's completely miscalculated remake...
...there's a knock on Joel and Ethan Coen, the writer-director brothers who otherwise have enjoyed a quarter-century of critical acclaim, it's that they betray a condescension, almost a contempt, for the people they've created. From the lover-killers in the Coens' first feature, Blood Simple, to the babynappers in Raising Arizona and a raft of Minnesotans in Fargo, all manner of desperately striving oafs populate the Coen gallery of film art. The brothers have been very smart about their characters' being very stupid...
...Indonesian tsunami, or the like number displaced by Katrina. But Ponyo, which the Disney Company will release in the States next year, is a parable for children, and they're entitled to the gift of hope. Besides, it's the genius of anime deity Hayao Miyazaki, the movie's writer-director, to create elemental images more wondrous than alarming - whether they're the forest demons of Princess Mononoke or the the bathhouse ghosts who transform the heroine's parents into pigs in Spirited Away. In Miyazaki's fantasy realm, people, even his putative villains, are less likely to be destroyed...
...certainly without malice aforethought, he ended up - very profitably - on the Nazi side during the war. After jail, he's exiled to a remote corner of the country, where he has plenty of time to reflect on the error of his ways. His recollections form the substance of writer-director Jirí Menzel's wry yet wiry fable...
...cleanse by annihilating; that's what Dr. Strangelove and other black comedies of the '60s did. But genuine satire is hard to find on the big screen these days, or any day, because its strident moralist tone tends to alienate audiences. In the definition of the form by Broadway writer-director George S. Kaufman, "Satire is what closes on Saturday night...