Email Author Nick Pinkerton

2012 Stories by Nick Pinkerton

• Promised Land's Hard Sell

  published December 26, 2012

  Salesmen are typically depicted in screen drama as the quintessential American phonies. The exceptions—in Barry Levinson's Avalon... More >>

• Tabu's Brilliant Look at Colonial Fantasy

  published December 26, 2012

  Tabu is one of those truly unique movies you can get tongue-tied just trying to describe: a tragic pop pastiche? A lyrical Old Hollywood... More >>

• On the Road Is Tamed at Last

  published December 19, 2012

  Two sacred texts of the '50s proto-counterculture have escaped the rapacious machine of cinema adaptation for a half-century. One is J.D.... More >>

• Michael Haneke's Chilly, Lauded Amour

  published December 19, 2012

  There are two things that are certain in life. One is that death will come for every one of us. The other is that every film Michael Haneke... More >>

• Taking the Measure of Ben Gazzara, at Anthology

  published December 12, 2012

  Green-gold eyes sparkling with seen-it-all bemusement, a smile that could express everything except unguarded mirth, and a baritone like... More >>

• Honor Flight

  published December 5, 2012

  Greatest-generation stoicism meets gushing contemporary sentiment in Honor Flight, Dan Hayes's documentary about the Wisconsin chapter... More >>

• Hidden Colors 2: The Triumph of Melanin

  published December 5, 2012

  What has been hidden in doc Hidden Colors 2: The Triumph of Melanin is a whole global history of black accomplishment, and so Tariq... More >>

• A Man Apart: Jean-Louis Trintignant at Film Forum

  published December 5, 2012

  The dichotomy of French actors in the talkie era was defined in the '30s by Jean Gabin and Michel Simon: the minimal and the maximal,... More >>

• Movie Violence Has Never Been Better—Or More Reckless

  published November 28, 2012

  Part of the renascent body-count action industry, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning—whose star, Dolph Lundgren, graces the... More >>

• Beware of Mr. Baker: Give the Drummer Some Slack?

  published November 28, 2012

  "Bonham had technique, but he couldn't swing a sack of shit," says great drummer and sack of shit Ginger Baker to interviewer Jay Bulger. This... More >>

• Dragon (Wu xia)

  published November 28, 2012

  The roaring popular success of Peter Chan's Wu xia in China—renamed Dragon for export—is no mystery: It's an adept... More >>

• The Collection

  published November 28, 2012

  A murkily directed bore "dealing" with the subject of serial killers and revenge only to reconfirm to its horror-fanboy audience that both are... More >>

• Silent Night

  published November 28, 2012

  As the Christmas-set horror movie is a subgenre to itself by now, it is almost touchingly naive when Silent Night kicks off with a... More >>

• Christ, It's Another Red Dawn

  published November 21, 2012

  America has had its national traumas—its Antietams and Pearl Harbors and 9/11s—but what we haven't faced since the Battle of... More >>

• Cartoonerus Hilarious: 'Chuck Amuck' at BAM

  published November 21, 2012

  An entire modernist canon encompassing Eliot and Beckett might be grouped under the heading "The Art of Futility," but where does this art find... More >>

• Man at War

  published November 21, 2012

  A documentary about devout players of the World War II computer flight simulator IL-2 Sturmovik, the nimble, funny Man at War... More >>

• A Short History of Cinema's Long Passing

  published November 14, 2012

  That the American cinema is deader than Dillinger is a fact no right-thinking observer unwilling to be laughed out of the room would even think... More >>

• 16 Acres

  published November 14, 2012

  Watching 16 Acres brings back a decade of Daily News headlines glanced while waiting at the bodega for your regular... More >>

• Anna Karenina, Now With Extra Artifice

  published November 14, 2012

  Joe Wright's dust-blowing new adaptation of Anna Karenina faces a towering mountain of precedent: not only the greatest novel by the man... More >>

• Nothing but a Man: This Is(n't) a Man's World

  published November 7, 2012

  Nothing but a Man was shot in the summer of 1963—the summer of Medgar Evers, George Wallace at the University of Alabama, and "I... More >>

• Lustig for Life: Dipping into Grimy Genre Greats from the Warner Archive

  published November 7, 2012

  For the fourth year running, sweatpanted sage William Lustig—Bronx-born director of 1980's Maniac and helmsman of Blue Underground... More >>

• In Another Country

  published November 7, 2012

  Hong Sang-soo's films consist of a few familiar items—empty Soju bottles and seaside views among them—being minutely rearranged,... More >>

• Dangerous Liaisons

  published November 7, 2012

  The least one should hope for from another adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons is savory, salacious trash, but... More >>

• Denzel Washington Sulks, Soars in Flight

  published October 31, 2012

  The yammering about "Oscar gold" and Denzel Washington's potential three-peat will soon reach a deafening pitch, but such noise can only... More >>

• The Man With the Iron Fists

  published October 31, 2012

  As Wu-Tang Clan's principal producer and myth-maker, Robert "RZA" Diggs translated the group's rugged urban background into the language of... More >>