Tag Archives: johnny depp

Michael Mann, "Public Enemies" (2009).

There’s one flat-out great sequence in Michael Mann’s new film, Public Enemies, the kind that makes you wish you were watching another movie. It’s a spectacular (and poorly thought-out) shoot-out in a lodge in the Wisconsin woods where John Dillinger and Babyface Nelson, the two most notorious gangsters of their time, are holed up. It’s [...]

Tim Burton, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (2005).

I figure I must have read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory back in 1981, and so, while watching Tim Burton’s new film, I realized I’d completely forgotten the gleeful, childlike perversity in which Willy Wonka dispatches the children to their bloated, slimed, filthy and taffy-pulled fates. It’s nothing new: it’s an element that’s [...]

Mike Newell, “Donnie Brasco” (1997).

Donnie Brasco is a tragedy, and the opening credits alone tell us this: the keening violins, the somber blank-and white photography, the close-up of Al Pacino’s eyes. It’s a far cry from films like Pulp Fiction, which mined similar territory by focusing on a gang of criminal lowlifes. But one of the funnier scenes in [...]