Spoiler Scale (How spoilery is this article on a scale of 1 to 10?):  3   “I don’t know Pauline Kael.  Fuck Pauline Kael.”  It’s the kind of comment that a serious film critic may find downright “unseemly,” but that’s kind of the point.  As delivered by a long-time friend and colleague of Roger Ebert in the documentary Life Itself, it sums up Ebert’s place, relatively speaking, ... Read More »

Having just battled through the difficulty of writing a post about my favorite Stephen King horror adaptations, I was dismayed by several recent reviews for Cloud Atlas (2012) – the Wachowski siblings’ adaptation of David Mitchell’s best-selling novel.  I have not read this novel, but I feel like I have.  I mean, I am now well aware of the differences in narrative structure between the film and the novel, thanks ... Read More »