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Nathan Lee

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Untraceable Rehashes Other Torture Flicks

Following the film's lame-brained argument, we're all to blame for this massively dumb movie

By Nathan Lee
Jan 25, 2008

Regarding the irrelevance of Untraceable: First of all, torture is so 2007, and just because this drab little thriller with a flashy love of pain imagines itself a "critique of violence" doesn't make it any less superfluous. Second of all, untraceable? Ha! You wish. While it's true that the villain...
Film 2007: Hit List

The top movies of 2007

By Scott Foundas, J.hoberman, Nathan Lee, Jim Ridley, Ella Taylor and Robert Wilonsky
Dec 27, 2007

It’s that time of year again. Our six critics don’t always (or often) agree, but we’ve combined their top 10 lists (allowing for ties) to pretend like they do! So without further ado, the 10 (or 15) best movies of the year, kind of: There Will Be Blood The Texas...
349 Movies to Go

Preparing for the onslaught that is the Toronto Film Festival

By Nathan Lee
Oct 19, 2007

Sundance signals, for better or worse, the state of American independent filmmaking. Cannes keeps faith, for those who still believe, with the cinema d'auteur. And Toronto? The largest and most important film festival in North America seems to do nearly as many things as there are movies to see349 in...
'Darjeeling' Brings Depth, Whimsy

Wes Anderson's road trip tale of brotherly love features Adrian Brody, Owen Wilson

By Nathan Lee
Oct 11, 2007

The estranged brothers Whitman have reunited for a journey onboard The Darjeeling Limited, a colorful old locomotive traversing the Rajasthan region of India. Along the way, they will stop to visit temples ("Probably one of the most spiritual places on earth!") and shop for souvenirs (slippers, cobras, pepper spray), with...
Videocam of the Dead

George Romero's latest takes on the YouTubers; zombies preparing vlog response.

By Nathan Lee
Sep 13, 2007

Late at night, alone in the woods, a group of film students at work on a no-budget horror film called The Death of Death are interrupted by — the death of death. Reports of animated corpses feeding on human flesh come over the radio and are met with nervous skepticism;...
So Close, and Yet So Far

The intimate pleasures and necessary detachments of Toronto 2007

By Nathan Lee
Sep 13, 2007

The exemplary achievements of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival succeeded by two means: either narrowing the gap between author and subject in pursuit of intimate effects, or else working distance into the material and profiting from the vantage. Contemporary neorealism at its most confident and alert, Chop Shop finds...
349 Movies to Go

Preparing for the onslaught that is the Toronto Film Festival

By Nathan Lee
Sep 6, 2007

Sundance signals, for better or worse, the state of American independent filmmaking. Cannes keeps faith, for those who still believe, with the cinema d'auteur. And Toronto? The largest and most important film festival in North America seems to do nearly as many things as there are movies to see—349 in...
Greetings from Toronto...

Where old masters, drunk teenagers and Asia Argento make the fest's first week a blast

By Nathan Lee
Sep 6, 2007

It's pretty much a toss-up which I love more: gorging on cinema or getting up at noon. And so, on the first day of the Toronto International Film Festival, in lieu of contemplating Bela Tarr's The Man from London, I lingered in my pajamas anticipating Delta Chelsea's The Breakfast from...
Test My Balls of Fury

You want answers to last week's quiz? We got answers.

By Nathan Lee
Sep 6, 2007

1. Balls of Fury is a movie about: a. A former table tennis prodigy (Dan Fogler as Randy Daytona) enlisted by the FBI to infiltrate the underground ping-pong tournament of a legendary Chinese criminal (Christopher Walken). b. Suppository jokes. c. Little worth discussing and even less worth seeing. d. All...
Test My Balls of Fury

Answer all correctly and win a Def Leppard album

By Nathan Lee
Aug 30, 2007

A quiz: 1. Balls of Fury is a movie about: a. A former table tennis prodigy (Dan Fogler as Randy Daytona) enlisted by the FBI to infiltrate the underground Ping-Pong tournament of a legendary Chinese criminal (Christopher Walken). b. Suppository jokes. c. Little worth discussing and even less worth seeing...
A Star is Bourne (Again)

Amnesiac-spy trilogy culminates in a thrilling Ultimatum

By Nathan Lee
Aug 2, 2007

The Bourne Ultimatum opens in Russia as the amnesiac super-spy Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) does what he does best: elude capture, crack skulls, brood. Lickety-split he's en route to Paris, nursing his wounds and breaking out with a bad case of those itchy-scratchy hallucinations known as Hollywood Flashback Syndrome. Choice...
Charge of the Light Brigade

Racing to reignite the sun—and our souls—in Danny Boyle's sci-fi collage

By Nathan Lee
Jul 19, 2007

In the observation room of the spacecraft Icarus II, passengers sit on a bench in front of a large, rectangular screen displaying a view of what lies ahead. They gaze at the spectacle as you might marvel at special effects on some ostentatious plasma monitor. A seething orb of gas...
Auto-Chaotic

As giant robots transform all around us, it's good to know Michael Bay won't ever change

By Nathan Lee
Jul 5, 2007

Transformers twiddles its big, fat, stupid robotic thumbs for the better part of two hours before jabbing them into your eye sockets and finger-fucking your brain in the last 20 minutes. Yes! It's torture enough waiting for the iPhone and the second coming of Jesus without wondering when, exactly, this...
Long Day's Journey, Indeed

Let's call the follow-up to cult fave Night Watch what it is: just another drawn-out sequel

By Nathan Lee
Jun 7, 2007

Night Watch, you may recall, told of an ancient feud waged between the forces of Light and Dark. In the interest of maintaining a fragile détente, they organized themselves, as Russian super-combatants are wont to do, into complex bureaucracies, with the Night Watch heroes monitoring the vampiric shenanigans of the...
Pirates: At Wit's End

It's time to throw Jack Sparrow overboard

By Nathan Lee
May 24, 2007

And so Disney's immense, booty-busting, pro-piracy epic has come to an End. I doubt very much that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is, in fact, the last we'll be seeing of Captain Jack Sparrow and, you know, all those other people. How could it be? Treasure remains to...
209 Weeks Later

War on zombies, war on terror, what's the diff?

By Nathan Lee
May 10, 2007

Four years after "Mission Accomplished," 28 Weeks Later reminds us that the mission, whatever the hell it was to begin with, is now officially, apocalyptically fucked. The story thus far: Seven months have gone by since the Rage virus passed from chimp fang to British bloodstream in an animal-rights intervention...
The Empire Strikes Back

By J.hoberman and Nathan Lee
Mar 22, 2007

Inland Empire: A movie about David Lynch's obsessions, Inland Empire includes familiar tropes such as a movie within the movie and the notion of Hollywood as haunted house. But nothing in Lynch's work is truly familiar. Reality is first breached when a ditsy Polish gypsy traipses into the disconcertingly empty...
What a Difference a Day Makes

Be forewarned: Time-warped Sandra Bullock flick not as bad as you think

By Nathan Lee
Mar 15, 2007

The space-time continuum smacks the shit out of Sandra Bullock in Premonition, the latest in nonlinear nonsense, but the fun really gets going when she starts to smack back. As Linda Hanson, humdrum mom of Anywhere, U.S.A., Bullock sets things up by doing her thing, effortlessly establishing the girl next...
Man-on-Man Action

It's Spartan hotties vs. Persian trannies in 300

By Nathan Lee
Mar 8, 2007

Long ago there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amidst copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their manly...
Omigod! This Is Stupid!

Shocking numerical revelations await in Jim Carrey's totally freaking random thriller

By Nathan Lee
Feb 22, 2007

The Number 23 grips hold of one stupid idea and runs so far with it, in so many directions, to such little purpose, that it nearly won me over from sheer berserkoid effort. In a nutshell, this nutso movie observes what happens to a man (Jim Carrey) under the impression...
Live Like a Refugee

Jude Law gets his urban renewal on in Minghella's dramatic dud

By Nathan Lee
Feb 8, 2007

Let us applaud, on principle, Anthony Minghella's return to small-scale storytelling. Breaking and Entering marks his first original screenplay since the oddball romcom Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991) and a retreat from the jumbo-sized period pieces of his Miramax-to-the-max phase. Overrated as they are, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley...
Edie Made Easy

Queen of the Factory and '60s Beauty #1 gets the superficial biopic treatment

By Nathan Lee
Feb 8, 2007

Ticket buyers to Factory Girl are in for a drag; not even the drag queens will like it. Cookie-cut from the biopic assembly line, this life and times of Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) is the least fabulous movie imaginable about the most fabulous persona in that most fabulous of scenes,...