Philip Martin

Movie Review: New York, I Love You

New York, I Love You is the second installment (after 2006’s Paris, j’taime) in a proposed series of portmanteau films about big cities and little serendipitous romances.
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Movie Review: An Education

An Education is about the British preoccupation with status, about the aspirant bourgeois and the outliers who exist beyond convention, in a moveable feast of booze, sex and petty criminality. It’s a surprisingly gentle film given it’s about a precocious 16-year-old honor student’s affair with a cad twice her age - an affair that occurred in a time and place where indiscretions had large consequences.
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CRITICAL MASS: Harington is stilled; his music plays on

EDITOR’S NOTE: Arkansas writer Donald Harington died Nov. 7. Philip Martin’s column today is his tribute to the man described as “America’s Greatest Unknown Writer” by Entertainment Weekly magazine.
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Living decently even in ordinary ways

We are, I believe, pretty much what we seem to be. There are exceptions, of course, hypocrites and smiling assassins, sociopaths who somehow manage to pass as ordinary quiet men who kept to themselves until the day their floorboards are pulled up to reveal the grisly byproducts of their existence. It happens.
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Movie Review: 2012

It’s the end of the world as we know it’s not

Loud and preposterous, blusteringly vacant and at times ruthlessly entertaining, 2012 is the sort of inevitable exploding movie that frustrates description: It’s sort of an Airplane/Scary Movie-style satire pastiche of disaster movies (specifically Irwin Allen disaster movies such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno), backed down just enough that it could be received as a straight sci-fi actioner.
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Movie Review: Pirate Radio

Pirate Radio is an amiable mess of a period piece about an interesting time in British pop music history when, in the mid-1960 s, the BBC’s control of the airwaves was threatened by offshore broadcasters beaming the sounds of England’s newest hitmakers into British bedrooms and parlors.
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Movie Review: Bronson

A stylized portrait of a criminal famous in his native Britain as perhaps the most violent man in Her Majesty’s prison system, Bronson serves primarily as a showcase for Tom Hardy’s undeniably brilliant performance.
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ON FILM: Film previews often out of critic’s reach

It’s time for another edition of “Ask Mr. Big Shot Movie Man.” All questions answered are genuine, though perhaps intended rhetorically, and are from actual readers.
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CRITICAL MASS: It’s Up and away at the Oscars

We are entering the time of year when moviegoers — or at least movie critics — begin to compile their lists of the year’s best. Usually November and December are the prime months for the release of what Hollywood considers its best shots at Academy Award glory.
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Consequences can outweigh enthusiasm

We were in the hallway outside the sacristy, in our altar robes and our slick-soled leather shoes. Because it was Sunday, we were thinking about football. One of us had one—a plastic palm-sized promotional giveaway—and were flinging it back and forth in flat arcs that nearly grazed the ceiling.
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