Email Author Nick Pinkerton

2012 Stories by Nick Pinkerton

• The Woman in the Septic Tank: Poverty Film Farce

  published May 23, 2012

  The Woman in the Septic Tank is a cheeky backstage farce of the poverty-film genre frequently exported by developing nations—here,... More >>

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  Men in Black 3: The Bummer of '69

  published May 23, 2012

  Can any one of the millions of Americans who saw Men in Black 2 in 2002 describe its plot today? A single scene? I saw both MIB... More >>

• Family Ties that Break and Bind in Elena and The Color Wheel

  published May 16, 2012

  Andrey Zvyagintsev's Elena is a tale of two apartments. The film is bookended by shots that look in, covetously, on a spacious chrome,... More >>

• Morgan Spurlock Scratches the Surface of Your Stupid Beard in Mansome

  published May 16, 2012

  'I think that men are having an identity crisis, but they don't really know it." So says "biological anthropologist" Helen Fisher, speaking in... More >>

• Battleship: Because Every Generation Needs an Armageddon

  published May 16, 2012

  Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so utterly shameless that it achieves a certain grandeur. Peter Berg’s... More >>

• Lovely Molly

  published May 16, 2012

  The "name" connected to Lovely Molly is that of director Eduardo Sánchez, one of the perpetrators of 1999's Blair Witch... More >>

• Vampires, All of Them: On Dark Shadows and God Bless America

  published May 9, 2012

  A significant portion of Tim Burton's output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the "Burton treatment" to susceptible texts:... More >>

• Portrait of Wally

  published May 9, 2012

  Aside from incalculable human cost, World War II left property-rights issues whose repercussions are felt to this day in its wake. Nowhere is... More >>

• The Observers

  published May 9, 2012

  Jacqueline Goss is an experimental filmmaker whose short works using free-ranging associations, 2-D digital graphics, and apposite tidbits... More >>

• Renior's Grand Illusion Just Got Grander

  published May 9, 2012

  Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion opened in an anxious France in June of 1937, as wars were going badly for the Spanish and Chinese... More >>

• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

  published May 2, 2012

  The British have practically cornered the multiplex's senior demo (think Waking Ned Devine and Calendar Girls) and look to be... More >>

• Mother's Day

  published May 2, 2012

  The domestic-hostage film is the elimination-style reality-TV show of thriller movies, both of which offer the spectacle of personalities... More >>

• A Little Bit of Heaven

  published May 2, 2012

  A successful young New Orleans ad exec living a no-frills, booty-on-call, single-by-choice lifestyle, Marley Corbett has a sunny irreverence... More >>

• Deep In the Heart of Texas with Richard Linklater's Bernie

  published April 25, 2012

  Richard Linklater's Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals... More >>

• Bonjour Tristesse

  published April 25, 2012

  Based on a salacious bestseller by posh enfant terrible Françoise Sagan, Otto Preminger's formally dazzling 1958 film is an edifice... More >>

• The Pirates! Band of Misfits

  published April 25, 2012

  The year is 1837. A newly crowned Queen Victoria, voiced by Imelda Staunton and animated in clay as a shrewish little turnip of a woman,... More >>

• Once Upon a Movie Dreary

  published April 25, 2012

  At the height of his literary fame, Edgar Allan Poe, who popularized cryptography in his story “The Gold Bug,” was so renowned as a... More >>

• Another Day, Another Drink in The Day He Arrives

  published April 18, 2012

  You don't have to understand the intricacies of Korean manners to enjoy Hong Sang-soo's subtly mortifying comedies. Nor do you have to be on... More >>

• Fightville

  published April 18, 2012

  Locker-room doc Fightville reports on a very specific milieu: minor-league mixed martial arts as practiced in the strip-mall gyms,... More >>

• To the Arctic 3D

  published April 18, 2012

  Making up for its 40-minute run time in turgidity and sheer size, To the Arctic, whose 70mm IMAX presentation stretches postcard hokum... More >>

• Lockout

  published April 11, 2012

  The 56th president of the USA's do-gooder daughter, Emilie (Maggie Grace), is on a fact-finding trip to SuperMax Prison Planet MS: One—a... More >>

• Detention

  published April 11, 2012

  Horror-comedy Detention combines the bravura mash-up showmanship and Wikipedic '90s pop-culture savvy of a Girl Talk album with the... More >>

• Kids of Today

  published April 11, 2012

  The rock doc being the most moribund of film forms, Kids of Today begins with a promisingly strange, stagy setup. In the course of... More >>

• The Three Stooges: The Movie

  published April 11, 2012

  For Bobby and Peter Farrelly, the low-comic connoisseurs whose brand name-establishing debut was 1994's Dumb and Dumber, this antic,... More >>

• The Woman Who Wasn't There

  published April 11, 2012

  Given our ongoing mourning-by-proxy and industry of share-the-grief entertainments, it seems a desire to experience the events of September... More >>