Author: Peter Schilling

  • Two-Lane Blacktop

    This ’71 film could simply be described as an homage to guys behind the wheel. James Taylor plays the Driver. The Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson is the Mechanic. Laurie Bird is the Girl. Together, they motor along Route 66 in their ’55 Chevy. Along the way they meet Warren Oates’s GTO and begin to race—with…

  • Margot at the Wedding

    Director Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to his magnificent The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding looks to be yet another biting examination of family. Here, the acid-tongued title character (Nicole Kidman, whose legacy desperately needs shoring up) visits her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh—she also could stand a modest hit), who is about to be…

  • Deep Water

    “This was something that a human hadn’t yet attempted to do … there was considerable doubt if a human could take it.” “This” was the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, when the British newspaper dared any single person to circumnavigate the globe in a yacht. The five-thousand pound purse lured eight professional sailors and…

  • Romance and Cigarettes

    After buying the rights in 2005, Sony Pictures apparently didn’t know what to do with this blue-collar musical, and left the film to rot on its shelves for the last two years. Two years later, director John Turturro wrestled back the rights from the studio and is distributing it on his own dime. Romance and…

  • The Waste Land

    No Country for Old Men opens with a series of shots of a dry, desolate Texas, a place that seems unkind to both man and beast. Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) begins to speak in voice-over, ruminating on his life, on his being a sheriff, admiring the men who served before him, and lamenting the…

  • Sleep and Indifference

    Pickup on South Street, playing Monday night at the Parkway Theater. The tombs are beautiful,the naked Latin and the engraved fatal dates,the coming together of marble and flowersand the little plazas cool as courtyardsand the many yesterdays of historytoday stilled and unique.We mistake that peace for deathand we believe we long for our endwhen what…