Watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou initially created a pleasant sensation — ah, yes, my old friend Wes Anderson — that over two hours turned tedious and finally grating. Anderson has taken his love of artifice and dry humor to its logical end and proves that it doesn’t work. Now, hopefully, he can go back to making rewarding movies.
Butchies, The, Make Yr Life, PJ Harvey’s Uh Huh Her, Tift Merritt’s Tambourine, Probot, and Annie Quick’s Bigger
Rolling Stone collects its critics’ individual top-10 lists here.
Slate’s always enjoyable Movie Club is back in action for a pillow fight over the movies of 2004.
Maria Full of Grace is a straightforward, clinical, nearly artless movie that starts out as a rote tract on the human cost of the drug trade and eventually builds itself into a story in which the audience has an emotional investment. In the end, it sits somewhere between the brilliant and razor-sharp British miniseries Traffik and its obvious, too-condensed American re-make Traffic (directed by Steven Soderbergh).
