Email Author NICK PINKERTON

2012 Stories by NICK PINKERTON

• 'Tabu': Let's Go Native

  published December 27, 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... More >>

• 'Amour': The Letting Go

  published December 20, 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 >>

• Give Ginger Baker Some Slack?

  published December 6, 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 >>

• The Way We Die Now

  published November 29, 2012

  Part of the renascent body-count action industry, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning's mere existence might shock many Americans.... 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... More >>

• 'Anna Karenina': The Play of the Movie of the Book

  published November 15, 2012

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

• The Sky Keeps Falling!

  published November 15, 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 >>

• Denzel Washington Sulks, Soars In 'Flight'

  published November 1, 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 Wachowskis' Foggy Notion

  published October 25, 2012

  The trailer for Cloud Atlas, the gargantuan new movie of David Mitchell's 2004 novel that took two Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer... More >>

• 'Hotel Transylvania': Everybody Knows I'm a Movie-Favorite Monster

  published September 27, 2012

  Casting a tapered, vase-slender silhouette and speaking in a Transylvanian accent with a touch of Borscht Belt, Hotel Transylvania's... More >>

• Game Boy: Paul W.S. Anderson

  published September 13, 2012

  The big movie event of September will be the anticipated latest from a certain filmmaker who signs his films with the surname Anderson and a... More >>

• 'Lawless': Take Me to the Backwoods Now

  published August 30, 2012

  Screening the history of bootlegging in urban America led to the invention of a genre—the gangster film—but moviegoers have seen... More >>

• The Old, Good 'Total Recall'

  published August 16, 2012

  Just because it made loads of money, stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and features a three-titted mutant doesn't mean Total Recall isn't... More >>

• 'New York' Vacation

  published August 9, 2012

  Calling back many of the same characters and more than a few of the same jokes, 2 Days In New York, Julie Delpy's fourth film as... More >>

• Do the Reggae: Hollywood Zion

  published August 2, 2012

  "Reggae is only what you hear and think is reggae," Peter Tosh pronounces at the beginning of Heartland Reggae (1980)—and a lot... More >>

• 'Ruby Sparks': Kill Your Darlings

  published July 26, 2012

  It's one of the most cherished legends of the American indie: A socially retarded ugly duck, despite making no effort to regulate his glaring... More >>

• Why So Serious, 'The Dark Knight Rises'?

  published July 19, 2012

  Christopher Nolan's ponderous, pontifical action movies are written less as screenplays than as operator's manuals, guiding an audience to... More >>

• 'Rock of Ages,' or 'Hair Metal: The Musical'

  published June 14, 2012

  A new star-clogged pop-musical diversion, Rock of Ages is a cinematic event. It's not every day, after all, that you get to see two... More >>

• 'Prometheus' Should Ridley Me Something Better Next Time

  published June 7, 2012

  Arriving in theaters on the back of a portentous ad campaign, Ridley Scott's Prometheus assumes the air of something more than a... More >>

• 'Snow White and the Huntsman' Is a Tale Overtold

  published May 31, 2012

  If ever there were a perfect example of pure, fresh, classical simplicity unnecessarily trodden under with complications, it is Snow White... More >>

• 'Men In Black 3' Travels Back in Time

  published May 24, 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... More >>

• Insert [You Sunk My 'Battleship'] Joke Here

  published May 17, 2012

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

• Killing for All the Right Reasons in 'God Bless America'

  published May 10, 2012

  Frank (Joel Murray) is an outcast. We first meet this divorced, fiftyish, glumly alcoholic white-collar worker—the protagonist of Bobcat... More >>

• Johnny Depp As Family Man In 'Dark Shadows'

  published May 10, 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 >>

• 'The Raven' Is Not the Poe Drama You Deserve

  published May 3, 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 >>