Email Author Nick Pinkerton

2012 Stories by Nick Pinkerton

• The Way We Die Now

  published November 29, 2012

  Part of the renascent body-count action industry, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning's mere existence might shock many Americans.... More >>

• Christ, It's Another "Red Dawn"

  published November 22, 2012

  America has had its national traumas — its Antietams and Pearl Harbors and 9/11s — but what we haven't faced since the... More >>

• Death of Cinema

  published November 15, 2012

  That the American cinema is deader than Dillinger is a fact no right-thinking observer unwilling to be laughed out of the room would even think... More >>

• Denzel Washington Sulks, Soars in Flight

  published November 1, 2012

  The yammering about "Oscar gold" and Denzel Washington's potential three-peat will soon reach a deafening pitch, but such noise can only... More >>

• Centuries of Too Muchness

  published October 25, 2012

  The trailer for Cloud Atlas, the gargantuan new movie of David Mitchell's 2004 novel that took two Wachowski siblings and... More >>

• Hotel Transylvania

  published September 27, 2012

  Casting a tapered, vase-slender silhouette and speaking in a Transylvanian accent with a touch of Borscht Belt, Hotel... More >>

• Trouble With Eastwood

  published September 20, 2012

  After a nationally televised improv exercise that, for better or worse, offered more unvarnished reality than anything else at this year's... More >>

• Paul W.S. Anderson's Fun, Frenetic Filmmaking

  published September 6, 2012

  The big movie event of September will be the anticipated latest from a certain filmmaker who signs his films with the surname Anderson and a... More >>

• Hillbillies vs. Peacocks in Lawless

  published August 30, 2012

  Screening the history of bootlegging in urban America led to the invention of a genre — the gangster film — but moviegoers have... More >>

• Hit & Run

  published August 23, 2012

  Hit & Run, a new action comedy engineered by faintly Muppety co-­director/writer/star Dax Shepard, is as much about running... More >>

• New York Vacation

  published August 23, 2012

  Calling back many of the same characters and more than a few of the same jokes, 2 Days in New York, Julie Delpy's fourth film as... More >>

• Killer Joe

  published August 9, 2012

  At one point in Killer Joe, a hideously funny tabloid noir set on the outskirts of Dallas County, Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) is let... More >>

• The Old, Good Total Recall

  published August 9, 2012

  Just because it made loads of money, stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, and features a three-titted mutant doesn't mean Total Recall isn't... More >>

• Ruby Sparks

  published August 2, 2012

  It's one of the most cherished legends of the American indie: A socially retarded ugly duck, despite making no effort to regulate his glaring... More >>

• Red Lights

  published July 26, 2012

  Red Lights aspires to be a genre movie of ideas. Like a great number of films dealing with supernatural and extraterrestrial... More >>

• Why So Serious?

  published July 19, 2012

  Christopher Nolan's ponderous, pontifical action movies are written less as screenplays than as operator's manuals, guiding an audience through... More >>

• Corporate Rock Still Sucks

  published June 14, 2012

  Rock of Ages, a new star-clogged pop-musical diversion, is a cinematic event. It's not every day, after all, that you get to see two... More >>

• Prometheus

  published June 7, 2012

  Arriving in theaters on the back of a portentous ad campaign, Ridley Scott's Prometheus assumes the air of something more than a... More >>

• Snow White and the Huntsman

  published May 31, 2012

  If ever there were a perfect example of pure, fresh, classical simplicity unnecessarily trodden under with complications, it is Snow White... More >>

• Men in Black Goes Back in Time

  published May 24, 2012

  Can any one of the millions of Americans who saw Men in Black 2 in 2002 describe its plot today? A single scene? I saw both MIB... More >>

• Battleship

  published May 17, 2012

  Every once in a while, a movie comes along that's so utterly shameless that it achieves a certain grandeur. Peter Berg's Battleship,... More >>

• Morgan Spurlock's Mansome

  published May 17, 2012

  "I think that men are having an identity crisis, but they don't really know it." So says "biological anthropologist" Helen Fisher, speaking in... More >>

• Tim Burton's Dark Shadows

  published May 10, 2012

  A significant portion of Tim Burton's output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the "Burton treatment" to susceptible texts:... More >>

• Bernie

  published April 26, 2012

  Richard Linklater's Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it... More >>

• The Problem with Romance

  published April 19, 2012

  The Deep Blue Sea, the first fiction feature in a dozen years from the visionary British director Terence Davies, is a film about... More >>