Articles by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Starting Out in the Evening

Andrew Wagner

PUBLISHED Jan 17, 2008

This is a movie that plays better in outline than in practice. The story, in which an ambitious grad student (Lauren Ambrose) has an affair...

Rocky: The Complete Saga

PUBLISHED Jan 14, 2008

In the beginning, there was Rocky, the 1976 surprise hit that won a bunch of Oscars and made Sylvester Stallone a star. Though it was never...

Eagle vs Shark

Taika Cohen

PUBLISHED Jan 14, 2008

Napoleon Dynamite had a lot to answer for with its grindingly unfunny exercise in twee hyperrealism and high-school ranking of geeks. But i...

Golden Door

Emanuele Crialese

PUBLISHED Jan 14, 2008

This wonderful film got the brush-off from critics when it opened early last year. That fact surprised me: it seemed a sensitive and compas...

It Came from Beneath the Sea

Robert Gordon

PUBLISHED Jan 14, 2008

The octopus in this early Ray Harryhausen effort is very impressive indeed. On a budget and without a net, the FX master managed to inject...

The Orphanage

Juan Antonio Bayona

PUBLISHED Dec 21, 2007

I was initially unimpressed with this Spanish horror romp, which seemed to have no driving purpose beyond being a Hollywood-style film set...

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Julian Schnabel

PUBLISHED Dec 21, 2007

Sympathy from outsiders can take strange forms. Here, notably able-bodied artist Julian Schnabel takes on a phenomenon he can’t possibly kn...

Atonement

Joe Wright

PUBLISHED Dec 14, 2007

I get the impression that this movie is about to be hailed as a masterpiece and it’s my duty to tell you that it’s not. But who cares about...