Email Author Nick Pinkerton

2009 Stories by Nick Pinkerton

• Crazy Heart: Country Music, Faded Stardom, Liquor, and Age

  published December 24, 2009

  Yesterday's honky-tonk hero, Bad Blake, arrives at a Clovis, New Mexico bowling alley. It's another in a string of low-pay, low-turnout gigs with... More >>

• Ricky Gervais Can Get Only So Far (or So Funny) with The Invention of Lying

  published October 1, 2009

  The Invention of Lying's plot hook sounds like a pile-up of Jim Carrey-Tom Shadyac concept comedies. The assumption is that there isn't... More >>

• The Dardennes Do What They Do (Again) in Lorna’s Silence

  published September 10, 2009

  Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, secular worker-priests of the Belgian cinema, emerge once more from their lower depths. In describing one of their... More >>

• My Sister’s Keeper Is Honest About Illness and False About All Else

  published June 25, 2009

  Eleven-year-old Anna Fitzgerald's parents didn't just plan for her — they customized her in utero, with the specific end of providing spare... More >>

• Drag Me To Hell: Sam Raimi Makes One Hell of a Comeback

  published May 28, 2009

  Sam Raimi wants to go home again. Often a drifting virtuoso in the years before finding his Spider-Man gig, with Drag Me to Hell... More >>

• Terminator Salvation: Don’t See This Film if You Want to Live

  published May 21, 2009

  Both warning and advertisement, the Terminator films are technophobic teases, selling tickets by promising this decade's model of killing machine:... More >>

• Last House on the Left Has Rape, Revenge and Yawning

  published March 12, 2009

  "That was the most offensive display of sexualized violence I have ever seen," one wilting fellow in need of a camphor hankie was... More >>

• Inkheart, Starring Brendan Fraser Has Direct Appeal for the "Reading is Fundamental" Crowd

  published January 22, 2009

  Brendan "Kids' Choice" Fraser returns to the multiplex daycare as "Mo" Folchart, antiquarian-book-repairman-cum-adventurer. In Inkheart's... More >>

• The Unborn Raids the Modern Horror Memory Bank, from The Exorcist to Auschwitz

  published January 8, 2009

  For as long as it forges ahead without explanations, The Unborn works in its way, as a series of snap-cut gotchas introducing each new... More >>