Email Author Jim Ridley

Awards

• 2006 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published March 24, 2005

  "Blown Opportunity"

• 2006 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published May 19, 2005

  "Lost in the Stars"

• 2006 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published September 1, 2005

  "Pulling Punch Lines"

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2008 Stories by Jim Ridley

• 2008 Film Poll: The Sound of One Audience Member Clapping

  published December 31, 2008

  Michael Jacobs, a filmmaker based in San Francisco, is the director of a movie called Audience of... More >>

• Marley & Me Is Beethoven with Less Shedding

  published December 24, 2008

  Satisfying only to pet-porn junkies whose tear ducts can't even withstand a 365 Ferrets a Year calendar, the movie version of John Grogan's... More >>

• Essential Sturges Fetes the Director, and His Powder-Keg Muse

  published December 24, 2008

  Sternberg had Dietrich, and Godard had Anna Karina—malleable, mysterious subjects whose faces eagerly absorbed the light their directors... More >>

• Stephen Kijak Lets the Artist Speak For Himself in Scott Walker: 30 Century Man

  published December 17, 2008

  Possessed of a lugubrious, histrionic baritone that could make the most trifling of pop ditties sound like a slow dance on the brink of... More >>

• Sinister Amusement To Be Had in Shoestring Sci-Fi Timecrimes

  published December 10, 2008

  Less a mindfuck on the level of 2004's ingenious Primer than a sort of mental canoodle, this modestly diverting slice of shoestring... More >>

• In Luc Besson's Universe, Transporter 3 Is 'Realism'

  published November 26, 2008

  Luc Besson, a French term meaning "Joel Silver," has latterly become xXx and The Fast and the Furious producer Neal H. Moritz's... More >>

• I Can’t Think Straight is Mildly Spicy Fluff

  published November 19, 2008

  Fall asleep flipping channels between Oxygen, Here!, and Lifetime, and you’re likely to find Shamim Sarif’s slickly innocuous lesbian... More >>

• Film-Noir Snow Globe: John Moore’s Max Payne

  published October 22, 2008

  If Oscars were handed out for fake snow, director John Moore’s bleary, dreary, sub–Sin City big-screen video game would clean... More >>

• Just Buried's Snickering Tone Provides a Few Sour Laughs

  published October 1, 2008

  More twee than any movie about serial murder has a right to be, writer-director Chaz Thorne's grisly farce ladles a quirky-cute score over its... More >>

• Elite Squad

  published September 17, 2008

  As ambiguous in its accused fascist leanings as the original Dirty Harry—and yet as reflective of its homeland's domestic turmoil... More >>

• The Absurdist Bloodshed of Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django

  published August 27, 2008

  Whether it's score-settling culture theft, a fever dream of interlinked Wild West mythology, or simply a company casserole of way-cool cinema,... More >>

• Disaster Movie

  published August 27, 2008

  In the Adam Sandler vehicle Little Nicky, Hitler spends eternity in Hell in a frilly smock getting pineapples shoved up his butt. Compared... More >>

• Katrina, Stark and Surreal, in Trouble the Water

  published August 19, 2008

  Hurricane Katrina may have driven off a large segment of New Orleans' African-American population. But in one sense the deadly storm was a... More >>

• A Tribute For Richard Widmark

  published August 19, 2008

  The late Richard Widmark, who died in March at age 93, was revered offscreen as one of Hollywood's true gentlemen and staunchest liberals. It... More >>

• Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer

  published August 12, 2008

  A good deal livelier than the usual music-doc embalming, this worshipful tribute to jazz singer Anita O'Day—completed shortly before her... More >>

• One Bad Cat: The Reverend Albert Wagner Story

  published August 12, 2008

  A bowling ball's black kitty face busting out of a white bag: Does this beguilingly simple sculpture evoke transcendence—a message that... More >>

• Man on Wire Recounts a Real-Life Superhero Caper

  published July 23, 2008

  Even as the first girders were laid in the mid-1960s, something about the World Trade Center—that twin-pronged erection jutting from the... More >>

• The Animation Show 4

  published July 23, 2008

  Less hit-or-miss than the long-running Spike & Mike packages of drawn-to-the-dark-side filth, this touring animation program curated by Mike... More >>

• Mad Detective from Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai

  published July 16, 2008

  More in the shaggy-dog style of his Running on Karma or Fulltime Killer than the epic scope of the Election movies or... More >>

• The Exiles: Soul and the City

  published July 9, 2008

  'The old people remember the past," a narrator says early in The Exiles over a prologue of Edward S. Curtis photographs—faces of... More >>

• Gonzo Salutes Hunter S. Thompson's Substance

  published July 2, 2008

  "In a nation of frightened dullards, there is always a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome." So... More >>

• William Holden: American Idol

  published July 2, 2008

  It's the end of the Civil War, and a ragged Confederate detail faces teeming Union forces. After a tense moment of contemplation, the cold-eyed... More >>

• Kabluey Captures Economic Anxiety Better Than Anything Else Out There

  published July 2, 2008

  From the film appearances of the San Diego Chicken to the penguin-suited thug who gave Jean-Claude Van Damme a flipper-smacking in Sudden... More >>

• Wanted: Irony-Free Escape-Fantasy

  published June 24, 2008

  Of the summer’s many revenge-of-the-nerd fulfillment fantasies—from The Incredible Hulk all the way down the megaplex food chain... More >>

• The Mother of Tears: Dario Argento Clowns Himself

  published June 3, 2008

  A topsy-turvy Escherland exists where Dario Argento's The Mother of Tears is considered a twisted classic, and it is a magical place. Up... More >>