Gregory Fichter

Ever since standing inside a frozen moment at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis – looking across to where the bullet must have issued, taking the life of an icon of nonviolent resistance – the image of Dr. Martin Luther King has become something more intimate to me. Black and white schoolroom footage becomes flesh, the voices less distant, when you stare into the full horizon of the cultural landscape...[Read More]

A few months ago the pared, gritty World War II tank picture Fury, led with muted intensity by Brad Pitt, caused little stir though it was a modest, hard-won victory in an old genre. It was also a far more involving trawl through war hell than the miscast, timid Unbroken. We have served countless tours through combat documents, all that history on film, it comes as a surprise then that director An...[Read More]

Prior to Chris Rock’s new film Top Five, my favorite of his scattered (sometimes sadly corny and embarrassing) big screen efforts has been the writer-director’s illuminating documentary Good Hair where he played himself: genial, witty, and inquisitive. Most of his movies underestimate Rock’s range of influences: his stage persona the dominant perception in everyone’s mind. But unless you’re Rodney...[Read More]

A Walk Among the Tombstones is a tidy, character-forward procedural offering up Liam Neeson in this year’s second “Liam Neeson movie” working in a more somber, less super-heroic mode than in Non-Stop or the Taken bonanza. A Walk Among the Tombstones finds haunted P.I. Matthew Scudder hunting a couple of sick slashers targeting 1990s New York women in a grim but engrossing dot-connector the likes o...[Read More]

What Richard Linklater’s Boyhood accomplishes is due the highest praise; as a feat of extended cinematic biography, there have been few experiments as rounded, detailed, and character-developed as this twelve-year gamble. Nailing my heart to the wall with a good growing-up tale is a favorite cinematic past-time going back to a lot of young, smart French faces in the 1950s and 1960s; Russian kids w...[Read More]

In scenes organized like the complimentary songs of a weary 2:00 am vinyl album, Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis unfolds as another of their heartfelt, seriocomic, unsentimental, fine-brush portraits of distinctly-Jewish men at an existential dead-end (Barton Fink, A Serious Man) – this time set amidst the grey dawn of the early Sixties boom in the Greenwich Village of folk clubs, earnes...[Read More]

Dallas Buyers Club comes as a victory lap in the complete career redefinition of Matthew McConaughey, rounding two years of engaged, unexpected roles in mainly independent films. His fallow period in comedies blandly paired with Kate Hudson or Jennifer Lopez proved too much for the man and the native Texan found his way into a series of southern blue-collar films (Killer Joe, Mud, The Paperboy) th...[Read More]

On first encountering the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black man drugged and kidnapped from an educated, domestic life by opportunistic slave-traders in Washington D.C., director Steve McQueen felt he had read the “[American version of the Anne Frank story]” – two historical people fated to represent institutionalized evils through very personal words and experiences. Northup, as embodie...[Read More]

Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space. I felt it in the new film Gravity; I knew what it was like to be set adrift in outer space. Not the series of half-understood, embellished images in a century of movies and books, but the foreign physical nature of muscle-free tumbling, crucially aided by instruments carefully calibrated by human brains and fashioned by other machines – devices to he...[Read More]

Reprehensible, pedophilic murderers are not usually the brand of character that is the focus of a revenge vendetta. If I am going to be encouraged in the course of a film to root for retribution for the fallen, then give me the opening slaughter of the family in Once Upon a Time in the West or “The Bride’s” wedding day massacre in Kill Bill. Revenge may be a tried and true motivation in the histor...[Read More]