Nick Pinkerton

Your Highness

Nick Pinkerton
YOUR HIGHNESS Your Highness plays like a dirty-joke blooper reel made by the cast of a junky sword-and-sorcery epic, streaked with carelessly contemporary-sounding blue humor, blunt profanity replacing the naughty-naughty, tankard-sloshing, heaving-bosom ribaldry that goes with the period setting. The scene: a generic medieval realm from an EverQuest or Forgotten......

Insidious

Nick Pinkerton
INSIDIOUS There is a great deal of prowling motion in Insidious: a recurring sideways dolly outside a haunted house, a trenchcoat-clad cacodemon pacing outside a second-story window. It’s the restless motion of a movie stalking its prey — you, dear viewer. Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne are moving their family......

Orgasm Inc.

Nick Pinkerton
ORGASM INC. Orgasm Inc. outlines the pharmaceutical industry–sponsored classification, diagnosis and marketing of FSD — female sexual dysfunction — as a disease suffered by “43 percent of women,” and the subsequent race for a lucrative cure. Innovations detailed include the Orgasmatron, a jerry-built spinal-implant doohickey, testosterone patches and the clinical......

Trust

Nick Pinkerton
TRUST Do you know who your kids are texting? Annie (Liana Liberato) is a typical 14-year-old suburbanite. Reading her instant-message conversations on-screen, the viewer is clued in to a secret life that her parents (Clive Owen and Catherine Keener) barely suspect — an ongoing, increasingly intimate correspondence with a boy......
Miral

Miral: Muddle East Politics

Nick Pinkerton
A United Nations premiere! A Vanessa Redgrave cameo! Zionist hoodlums! Distributors the Weinstein Company and director Julian Schnabel overcome their well-documented aversion to media attention to address the Israel-Palestine question, pleading peace, compromise and the creation of a self-governing Palestinian state. While Jewish advocacy groups swarm to Schnabel's bait, it......

Sucker Punch

Nick Pinkerton
SUCKER PUNCH A layer-cake trip with a touch of "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Sucker Punch begins, after a murky prologue, with Baby Doll (Emily Browning, a peroxided kewpie) being dragged into a home for the “mentally insane” by her wicked stepdad. Our heroine in a no-exit corner, we shift......

The Butcher, the Chef and the Swordsman

Nick Pinkerton
THE BUTCHER, THE CHEF AND THE SWORDSMAN The title describes the protagonists of three comic-fantastic stories set in a mud-toned feudal China, told in flashbacks that fit inside one another, matryoshka doll–style. The most avid fans of merciless mugging will be the sole admirers of the bookending story of Liu......

Kill the Irishman

Nick Pinkerton
KILL THE IRISHMAN With post-Goodfellas crime-movie tropes dyed for St. Patrick's Day, this Ballad of Danny Greene attempts to enshrine the Irish-American strongman, a real-life folk hero among mob-lore nerds and Cleveland teamsters for his Rasputin-like resilience through multiple assassination attempts. Kill the Irishman aims to come out bumping chests......

Happythankyoumoreplease

Nick Pinkerton
HAPPYTHANKYOUMOREPLEASE Sam (Josh Radnor) lives a slightly slummy version of sitcom-character leisure, his flirtatious lip-pursing in East Village bars financed by his short-fiction sales. ("Freelance writing" is defined herein as a career involving immaculate stubble, vertically stacked paperbacks and occasional glancing at a laptop.) Sam's routine is disturbed when he......

The Strange Case of Angelica

Nick Pinkerton
GO  THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA In 1952, Manoel de Oliveira sketched a fable of impossible longing that became, finally, The Strange Case of Angelica. Though the automobile models in de Oliveira's 2010 film are modern, many plot details remain of the period of its writing. On a torrentially rainy......