Sadly, Dark Knight Rises doesn’t have anything even remotely this cool looking in it.

I am shocked at how bad DARK KNIGHT RISES is.

To me Nolan, even at his best (THE PRESTIGE, MEMENTO), has never been more than a mildly interesting filmmaker. He’s ambitious in the least absorbing of ways. He’s way too pretentious to really play off the important pulp he seems to be reaching for. He habitually overcomplicates things. And yet I found DARK KNIGHT RETURNS to be pretty engaging. It certainly had many faults (some of them ideological) and it undeniably benefitted immensely from Heath Ledger’s performance. Still, it was enough to encourage me to go see RISES on the big screen.

And that’s how I found myself sitting through a three-hour exorcise in bloated, clumsy and sometimes surprisingly amateurish filmmaking. With every passing scene my initial curiosity turned to a finely honed hatred. Read more

White Sun of the Desert (1969) is one of the most popular Russian films of all time and is ritually watched by cosmonauts before space launches.

The Ostern, or “Eastern” – not to be confused with the Red Western (Eastern European films that took place in the American West) – was the Soviet and Eastern Bloc riff on the Western film genre. They were made from the late 50’s and on into the 80’s, with the high-water mark being hit in the 70’s. The adventure, action and comedy took place on the steppes and in the Asian parts of the Soviet Union and tended to chronicle the Russian Revolution and the Civil War that followed it. Read more