Easy A (Gluck, 2010)

Last updated on: January 16, 2015 at 8:08 pm By Kenneth R. Morefield

Smart, funny, and unexpectedly sweet, Will Gluck's Easy A is the most pleasant surprise of my film year, a high school comedy with wit rather than snark, charm rather vulgarity, and heart rather than hormones. Read more

Anything You Want (Mañas, 2010)

Last updated on: January 16, 2015 at 8:06 pm By Kenneth R. Morefield

Botto plays Leo, a Spanish lawyer with a wife, child, and healthy masculine disgust at all things homosexual. When his wife dies of a seizure and he can't bring himself to answer his daughter's pleas for a surrogate mom, he gradually begins dressing as the deceased mom to help the child cope. Read more

Tamara Drewe (Frears, 2010)

Last updated on: January 16, 2015 at 8:02 pm By Kenneth R. Morefield

Stephen Frears's Tamara Drewe is essentially a Restoration sex comedy set in the English countryside. Read more

The Illusionist (Chomet, 2010)

Last updated on: January 16, 2015 at 7:54 pm By Kenneth R. Morefield

So The Illusionist himself could be seen as a symbol of the traditional animator seeing his (or her) craft become a lost art. Read more

Of Gods and Men (Beauvois, 2010)

Last updated on: July 26, 2014 at 2:18 pm By Kenneth R. Morefield

I was glad that I saw Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men on the same day of the Toronto International Film Festival in which I saw Miral. The films, perhaps, balance one another, not in a Fox News faux-balanced agonistic culture sort of way, but rather in the much harder but more precious way of showing that presenting art from a particular perspective doesn’t have to mean bias and prejudice. (more…) Read more

Never Let Me Go (Romanek, 2010)

Last updated on: January 16, 2015 at 7:44 pm By Kenneth R. Morefield

I will cop to saying that Ishiguro is on my short list of greatest living writers in English and that Remains of the Day (also based on an Ishiguro novel) is one of my two or three all time favorite novel to film adaptations, so I'm not without baggage of my own in this debate. Read more

Jucy (Alston, 2010)

Last updated on: January 10, 2015 at 10:59 pm By Kenneth R. Morefield

I'm a little suspicious, though, about people who make films about their own friendships. Read more

The Way (Estevez, 2010)

Last updated on: August 5, 2015 at 10:57 am By Kenneth R. Morefield

There's not a whole lot about Emilio Estevez's The Way that doesn't ring true. Given the fact that the film tackles some of life's deepest emotions and largest themes--grief, love, faith, community--that's quite a compliment. Read more

Inside Job (Ferguson, 2010)

Last updated on: January 10, 2015 at 10:56 pm By Kenneth R. Morefield

A repeated hypothesis of Ferguson and his team was that such chutzpah comes from sustained periods of never being challenged--even as to obvious, verifiable facts--once one has been granted "inside" or "expert" status. Read more

Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (Rebello, 1990)

Last updated on: January 10, 2015 at 10:53 pm By Kenneth R. Morefield

Perhaps it is anathema for me to say, being an academic, but there is something refreshing about reading a film book that eschews theory, that is interested in documenting the production history of a beloved film rather than deconstructing it and is more interested in telling us what the people who made the film said than it is in explaining what they (must have) meant. Read more