Jack Mirkinson
Jack Mirkinson
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If you haven’t seen the BBC miniseries “State of Play,” stop reading this and watch. It’s one of the most enjoyable and gripping programs ever put on TV. If you can’t get your hands on it, a new American remake, which turns the six-episode series into a 2-hour movie, is pretty good, too.
The new story of ‘Sin’
“Sin Nombre” is a gripping hybrid: part romantic melodrama, part gangland tragedy, part immigrant thriller. It is also a remarkable accomplishment for first-time director Cary Fukunaga, who journeyed to Mexico and Honduras to make a film that confounds our expectations and opens our eyes.
So fresh, so ‘Clean’
It could have gone so wrong. The premise of Christine Jeffs’ “Sunshine Cleaning” — down-on-their-luck siblings start a business cleaning houses after people have died in them — is ripe for the kind of quirk overload that sinks many an indie darling.
Not your Daddy’s mob
“Gomorrah” is one of the most depressing films I’ve seen in quite some time, but it is also one of the most powerful — a brilliant and fervently downbeat exposé of the Camorra, the mobsters who dominate the Italian city of Naples.
What the Oscars got wrong
For everything the Oscars got right this year (all those nominations for “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Milk”), there’s even more they got wrong (13 for “Benjamin Button”). Jack Mirkinson surveys the damage.
An incomplete beauty
In the wake of the Israeli assault on Gaza, the arrival of “Waltz With Bashir,” which has been nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars this year, seems more timely than ever.
God save the happy
Although they’ve both come to our shores from Britain, Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” and Guy Ritchie’s “RocknRolla” could not be more different from one another. One is a quiet chronicle of the life of a working-class woman, and one is a loud, hard sprawl through London’s gangster scene. More importantly, one is terrific and one is terrible.
Mirkinson: 'W' goes nowhere, will be forgotten, sucks
Just as we get ready to elect a new president, “W” is here to remind us how insane the last eight years have been. Only some of the incredibly eventful Bush presidency is examined in Oliver Stone’s flawed attempt at what, in truth, is impossible: a comprehensive portrait of one of the most important figures of our time. But by omitting so many crucial events, and by failing to reach a decisive conclusion about Bush, Stone hasn’t come close to capturing the historical weight of the Bush period—that feeling that we have been living through a time of awful consequence.
America’s important-est home videos
Americans could be forgiven for forgetting about Katrina — after all, when’s the last time you heard either Barack Obama or John McCain mention it?
‘St. Anna’ a very poor Spike
Lee, always an inconsistent filmmaker, had been on an upswing recently. “Inside Man” was a lark of a heist flick in love with the multicultural beauty of New York. “When The Levees Broke,” a four-hour documentary on Hurricane Katrina, is, along with “Do The Right Thing,” his best work: scathing, elegiac and indispensable. But “Miracle” lacks both the precision that served Lee so well in “Inside Man” and the focused, politicized tone of “Levees.” He swings in different directions and winds up with a bloated, rudderless — and, at 160 minutes, very, very long — film that, in the end, can’t quite justify itself. This is a film that doesn’t know what it wants. Is it a mystical tale of miracles? A hard-eyed look at the complications of being a black soldier in a segregated army? A “Saving Private Ryan”-style gritty battle picture? A story of romance in wartime? “Miracle” tries to be all of these things and winds up succeeding at none of them. Each strand of the story is effective in spurts — a glimpse of racism in a Louisiana diner, or the final battle sequence, for instance — but because Lee is trying to cram so much into his film, none of it sticks. The cinematography is elegant and classicist, the music stirring, the acting decent and several sequences very moving, but it adds up to very little: bursts of interest surrounded by miles of dullness. Most of the story takes place in Italy in 1944 and centers around four members of the Buffalo Soldiers, the only all-black unit to fight in Europe. (The military would be desegregated in 1948.) Hector Negron (Laz Alonso), Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy), Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke) and Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller) wind up trapped in a postcard-perfect Italian village after Train rescues Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi), an Italian orphan, and needs a place to put him. The soldiers are surrounded by Nazis on all sides — Lee gives us close-ups of gleaming swatstikas in a melodramatic, e