Paul Malcolm

law logo2x b

All the President's Men, Network

Paul Malcolm
There’s a moment early in director Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) when Washington Post Metro editor Harry Rosenfeld (Jack Warden) argues that young reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) be put on the Watergate story. “They’re hungry,” Rosenfeld tells Post managing editor Howard......

Metropolitan

Paul Malcolm
A wickedly droll portrait of a doomed social class navel-gazing while awaiting its own extinction, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990) has itself become an emblem of a cultural moment long since faded away. Making its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990, the year after sex, lies and videotape “changed......
The author

Bubble Bath

Paul Malcolm
The movie started at 8 o’clock, so we ordered Thai around 7. Zac’s wife, Betsy, was on her way to dinner with a friend, which left Zac at home to look after their 2-year-old daughter, Vivienne. Kate and I had come over to watch the HDNet broadcast of Steven Soderbergh’s......
Photo Courtesy First Run Features

Gendernauts; Let Me Die a Woman

Paul Malcolm
On the heels of the DVD release of Monika Treut’s defiantly intimate documentary about San Francisco’s vibrant transgender community, Gendernauts (1999), comes the DVD debut of Doris Wishman’s defiantly exploitative pseudo-documentary, Let Me Die a Woman (1978). Distributed by First Run Features, Gendernauts takes us to the clinics, cabarets, dinner......
Dont Play Us Cheap

Don't Play Us Cheap; Story of a Three-Day Pass

Paul Malcolm
Melvin Van Peebles is still best known for Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), the incendiary independent film that opened the door for the blaxploitation era — a case of co-opted revolution if ever there was one. Less well-known are Van Peebles’ other early directorial efforts, Story of a Three-Day Pass......

Tony Takitani

Paul Malcolm
Films about isolation and loneliness tend to slide toward violence — think Taxi Driver and Repulsion — compelled in that direction as much by the cinema’s revulsion for stasis as by character motivation. Japanese director Jun Ichikawa (Osaka Story) resists this pressure in his latest film, Tony Takitani (2004), by......

Jesus, You Know

Paul Malcolm
There’s the Jesus you know, and there’s the Jesus you discover in the faces of the Austrian Catholics at the center of controversial Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s engrossing documentary about the power of prayer. Moving between works of nonfiction (Animal Love) and fiction (Dog Days), Seidl frequently turns a harsh,......
article placeholder

Top 10 DVDs of 2005

Paul Malcolm
This was the year that Hollywood’s latest golden goose started running out of puff. By mid-2005 DVD sales began slowing, with analysts later predicting a revenue flat line in the years ahead. The dire predictions only intensified the studios’ hunt for yet another disc of plenty, the two leading contenders......

In MacArthur Park

Paul Malcolm
Last seen as a clip in Thom Anderson’s bravura documentary collage, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Bruce Schwartz’s In MacArthur Park (1977) makes its DVD debut this week, thus filling a crucial gap in the home video fossil record of Los Angeles independent film production. With an American Film Institute grant......

Seven Men From Now

Paul Malcolm
When you think of Westerns, if the name Budd Boetticher doesn’t leap to mind, get ready to make room in your canon. One of the most fascinating and iconoclastic figures of postwar Hollywood, Boetticher came to the movies in the 1940s by way of Mexico, after having gagged on the......