Email Author Nick Pinkerton

2011 Stories by Nick Pinkerton

• Prom: As If Experiencing Your Own Wasn't Bad Enough

  published April 27, 2011

  “This one perfect moment.” “That soul-crushing mistress.” “Our forever night.” These and other understated... More >>

• The Banality of Evil: Same Old Epic Samurai Showdown in 13 Assassins

  published April 27, 2011

  Lord Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki) is a royal terror, and the court fears Caligula-like horrors should he come into his royal succession.... More >>

• Fist Bump: The Return of Chen Zen Struggles to Live Up to Its Pedigree

  published April 20, 2011

  Chen Zhen, a Chinese film folk-hero whose vocation is bucking off the yoke of Japanese imperialism, has a legendary pedigree: Bruce Lee... More >>

• Paging HGTV: Drifter Kids Set Up House in St. Nick

  published April 20, 2011

  A sullen boy—12, at the oldest—makes an abandoned shell of a house into a home with his younger sister. With time, you gather they... More >>

• Disney Exports American Superhero Fantasies to Bollywood with Zokkomon

  published April 20, 2011

  It's not such a small world, after all. A kid's movie dictated with second-language stiltedness, Zokkomon is the latest chapter in the... More >>

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  The Conspirator: Another Dull History Lesson From Robert Redford

  published April 13, 2011

  Set in the months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, The Conspirator follows the consequences of the fatal shot at Ford’s... More >>

• David Arquette and Courteney Cox, Together Again, in Scream 4

  published April 13, 2011

  Why won’t you die? There is a particular sort of stupid-acting-smart movie experience that can be achieved only through the reunion... More >>

• Realism Ruins the Mood in Italian Wannabe-Thriller The Double Hour

  published April 13, 2011

  Cinematographer Tat Radcliffe’s gray Turin sets the monotone of The Double Hour, while director Giuseppe Capotondi softens... More >>

• Chad's Civil and Generational War, as Seen From Poolside, in A Screaming Man

  published April 13, 2011

  At 50, Chadian writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun is old enough to have seen his homeland sink into carnage more than once. A Screaming... More >>

• Heat in the Bedroom and on the Battlefield in the Superb Princess of Montpensier

  published April 13, 2011

  The finest Western you’ll see this year is set in aristocratic 16th-century France, in the heat of Counter-Reformation. Mélanie... More >>

• Stoned and Throned in Your Highness

  published April 6, 2011

  Your Highness plays like a dirty-joke blooper reel made by the cast of a junky sword-and-sorcery epic, streaked with carelessly... More >>

• Celebrating Brian De Palma's Double Vision at BAM

  published April 6, 2011

  As with any creator who disdains whatever mode currently passes as realism for their own road, Brian De Palma has taken flak. He has been... More >>

• Blank City: A Self-Defeating User-Friendly Primer on the 'No Wave' Science

  published April 6, 2011

  Blank City is a self-defeating user-friendly primer on a group of films whose aura was enhanced by the fact that one had to brave... More >>

• Kati With an I: Chaperoning a High-School Senior in Alabama

  published April 6, 2011

  Documentarian Robert Greene chaperones 18-year-old Kati Genthner through the three days before her graduation (with honors) from Pleasant... More >>

• Ceremony: A Callow Movie About Callowness

  published April 6, 2011

  Sam (Michael Angarano), a young kids’-book author, suckers his neglected childhood best friend, Marshall (Reece Thompson), into driving... More >>

• Fine Ensemble Acting, Ham-Handed Social Commentary in Trust

  published March 30, 2011

  Do you know who your kids are texting? Annie (Liana Liberato) is a typical 14-year-old suburbanite. Reading her instant-message conversations... More >>

• Film Forum's 'Five Japanese Divas' Series Highlights Acts of Goddesses

  published March 30, 2011

  Rarefied Ozu, bold Kurosawa, saturnine Naruse, magisterial Mizoguchi. The Great Men are here, and then some, but Film Forum’s 23-feature... More >>

• Insidious: The Saw Duo Take Us Through a Haunted House

  published March 30, 2011

  There is a great deal of prowling motion in Insidious: a recurring sideways dolly outside an ominous house, a trench-coat-clad cacodemon... More >>

• Julian Schnabel's Miral: Muddle-East Politics

  published March 23, 2011

  A U.N. premiere! A Vanessa Redgrave cameo! Zionist hoodlums! Distributors the Weinstein Company and director Julian Schnabel overcome their... More >>

• Untying the Personal-Political Knot in My Perestroika

  published March 23, 2011

  Eight-millimeter home movies and statist hymns from the Soviet past haunt Robin Hessman’s documentary of a contemporary Russia pocked with... More >>

• Sucker Punch: Marginally Less Dreary Than Inception

  published March 23, 2011

  A layer-cake trip with a touch of "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Sucker Punch begins, after a murky prologue, with Baby Doll (Emily... More >>

• Directors Revisit the Past in Anthology's 'Auto-Remakes' Series

  published March 16, 2011

  In 1979, Trent Harris recorded his chance encounter in the parking lot of a Salt Lake City TV station with a celebrity impersonator and... More >>

• Nature vs. Nurture in the Dumb, Dull Bereavement

  published March 16, 2011

  One of the great dumb-movie fallbacks is the classroom scene in which the day’s lesson plan illustrates the movie’s theme, thus... More >>

• Merciless Mugging, Obnoxious Style in The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman

  published March 16, 2011

  The title describes the protagonists of three comic-fantastic stories set in a mud-toned feudal China, told in flashbacks that fit inside one... More >>

• 3 Backyards: A Mood Movie in Long Island

  published March 9, 2011

  A rare breed of mood-movie, 3 Backyards cross-fades through three stories, each beginning in an unidentified Long Island suburb. The... More >>