Email Author Nick Pinkerton

2012 Stories by Nick Pinkerton

• 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 >>

• The Shelf Life of the Clinton-era Tested in Titanic 3D and American Reunion

  published April 4, 2012

  A historical romance with a then-unheard-of price tag, James Cameron's 1997 Titanic was the nearest thing to a Gone With the... More >>

• Ruggles of Red Gap

  published April 4, 2012

  "It's a mess, isn't it?" "It's wonderful." This is small-town widow Prunella Judson (ZaSu Pitts) talking to British ex-butler Marmaduke Ruggles... More >>

• A Brute on the Ice, But a Good Guy at Heart, in Goon

  published March 28, 2012

  Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott) is a polite Jewish boy from fictional Orangetown, Massachusetts, whose one God-given talent is... More >>

• The Beat Hotel

  published March 28, 2012

  I have seen many passable minds of my generation fritter away their best creative years working on tributes to the creative minds of past... More >>

• Mirror Mirror

  published March 28, 2012

  The fairy-tale movie is "trending" at present, with promise of all sorts of bandwagoning rubbish to come, but Mirror Mirror, one of... More >>

• Fairy Tale Ending: Downtown Filmmaker Sara Driver's Lost Film, Found

  published March 21, 2012

  The way that Sara Driver tells the story of the resurfacing of her 1981 debut film, You Are Not I, has a touch of the mystical about... More >>

• Argento—Cinema in the Blood

  published March 21, 2012

  With the rise of found footage and you-are-there handheld, contemporary horror movies seem increasingly concentrated on simulating artlessness.... More >>

• Lovers Try to Stay Above Water in The Deep Blue Sea

  published March 21, 2012

  The Deep Blue Sea, the first fiction feature in a dozen years from the visionary British director Terence Davies, is a film... More >>

• The Power of Restraint in the Films of Terence Davies

  published March 14, 2012

  With The Deep Blue Sea, the great British director Terence Davies returns to the postwar period —though in a sense, he has never... More >>

• Seeking Justice

  published March 14, 2012

  Nic Cage has been in a flurry of activity since the IRS closed in on him in 2009, and, like the proverbial stopped clock, his promiscuous work... More >>

• Casa de Mi Padre

  published March 14, 2012

  Rogue comic Will Ferrell recently turned up on an Old Milwaukee commercial exclusively for the Davenport, Iowa, local market; the obvious next... More >>

• Good for Nothing

  published March 7, 2012

  The traditional story of the domestication of the West—cultivated woman from back East comes to the frontier and civilizes the wild... More >>

• One-Take Wonder: Reality-Horror Gets a Questionable Upgrade in Silent House

  published March 7, 2012

  The foundations of Silent House are laid atop La Casa Muda, a nil-budget 2010 Uruguayan horror film that... More >>