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We were a film couple. David Chute was writing film reviews for the Boston Phoenix when I met him in New York. He’d come down for a George Romero party, where we talked for hours. He had written two pieces for Film Comment, where I was the new Associate Editor. And even though I had landed my dream job, when he moved to Los Angeles to join Peter Rainer at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, he convinced me to ditch my Upper West Side rent-controlled apartment and move in with him in Koreatown. I had never been to California and had to learn how to drive. We were married in October 1983, and six years later, Nora arrived.

Sadly, we both said goodbye to David last week; he died at age 71 on November 8 of esophageal cancer. He had just moved back after eight years taking care of his father in Poland,...

We were a film couple. David Chute was writing film reviews for the Boston Phoenix when I met him in New York. He’d come down for a George Romero party, where we talked for hours. He had written two pieces for Film Comment, where I was the new Associate Editor. And even though I had landed my dream job, when he moved to Los Angeles to join Peter Rainer at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, he convinced me to ditch my Upper West Side rent-controlled apartment and move in with him in Koreatown. I had never been to California and had to learn how to drive. We were married in October 1983, and six years later, Nora arrived.

Sadly, we both said goodbye to David last week; he died at age 71 on November 8 of esophageal cancer. He had just moved back after eight years taking care of his father in Poland,...

David Chute, a longtime film critic and writer who tirelessly championed Hong Kong films in the U.S., died Nov. 8 in Los Angeles.

His daughter, Nora Chute, confirmed that he died of esophageal cancer.

Chute wrote for publications including the Boston Phoenix, Film Comment, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times and Variety, often advocating for genre films and international filmmakers to get the recognition they deserved.

Chute grew up in Maine with his father, Robert, a poet and biology professor at Bates College, his mother, Vicki, a novelist. He launched his career in the 70s as a film critic at the Kennebec Journal and The Maine Times, where he discovered Stephen King, who he also profiled for Take One. In 1979, King inscribed a copy of “The Shining” to David Chute, “the best film critic in America.”

In 1978, Chute joined the staff of The Boston Phoenix,...

David Chute, the authoritative film critic and writer who was an early champion of Stephen King, John Waters, John Woo and Asian cinema, has died. He was 71.

Chute died Nov. 8 in Los Angeles after a brief battle with esophageal cancer, his daughter, Nora Chute, reported.

David Christopher Chute was born on March 11, 1950, in Bangor, Maine. His father, Robert, was a poet and biology professor at Bates College, and his mother, Vicki, a novelist.

Chute attended the Putney School and St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and launched his career in the 1970s as a film critic at the ...

David Chute, the authoritative film critic and writer who was an early champion of Stephen King, John Waters, John Woo and Asian cinema, has died. He was 71.

Chute died Nov. 8 in Los Angeles after a brief battle with esophageal cancer, his daughter, Nora Chute, reported.

David Christopher Chute was born on March 11, 1950, in Bangor, Maine. His father, Robert, was a poet and biology professor at Bates College, and his mother, Vicki, a novelist.

Chute attended the Putney School and St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and launched his career in the 1970s as a film critic at the ...

I’d imagine every one of us, despite our individual life situations, however privileged or difficult they may be, wouldn’t have too much trouble coming up with a pretty long list of people and circumstances for which to be grateful, during the upcoming week traditionally reserved for the expression of thanks as well as throughout the entirety of the year.

Even in our brave new world, where gratitude and humility and generosity of spirit often seem to be in short supply, at the mercy of greed, abuse of power, disregard for the rule of law, and megalomaniac self-interest cynically masquerading as an aggressive strain of nationalist, populist passion, there are good, everyday reasons to look around and take stock of blessings in one’s immediate surroundings.

And speaking specifically as one who has the privilege and opportunity to occasionally write about matters concerning the movies, and even a (very...

Dennis Bartok

For many years I was the head of film programming for the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, a non-profit film group that currently runs the Egyptian and Aero Theatres. As part of my job I tried to keep my finger to the pulse of national cinemas from around the globe, both new and old, by combing through festival catalogues, talking to other programmers and watching as many movies as I could get my hands on (much of these in the old VHS days!)

In the 1990s and early 2000s I saw the rediscovery of some amazing bodies of world cinema such as Italian Horror and Giallo Cinema from the 1960s & 1970s by directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento, and Japanese Outlaw Cinema from the same period by hard-hitting genre filmmakers like Kinji Fukasaku, Seijun Suzuki and Kihachi Okamoto. But one thing I didn’t see, in repertory film calendars,...

Will the real Sarah please stand up? Breakout actress/chameleon Tatiana Maslany is back in Season Two of BBC America's much-lauded cloning thriller “Orphan Black" (April 19). In the new clip, Sarah now knows that she's part of a cloning experiment. She holds a gun to one clone, and we see another in a morgue. And there's a new romantic interest (Dutch actor Michiel Huisman of “Nashville”). Here's TV is the New Cinema's David Chute on Maslany, who also participated in a Kick-Ass Women panel at Comic-Con.

The top stories of the week from Toh!Awards:Why George Clooney Is Skipping Early Awards Circuit with "The Monuments Men": See New PosterBox Office:Top Ten Highest Grossing Woody Allen Movies vs. "Blue Jasmine"Features:toh! Ranks the Best Films of Wong Kar-Wai, with an Intro by David Chute (Audio Interview)Your Week in Streaming: A Bad Teacher, Zac Efron in Tighty Whities, Pasolini's Marxist Jesus and MoreFestivals:Venice Film Festival 2013 Review: Frears' 'Philomena' is a TriumphVenice Film Festival 2013 Review: Reichardt's 'Night Moves'Telluride Film Festival, Diary One: Big Anticipation for the 40th AnniversaryTelluride Review: Jason Reitman's "Labor Day" Is a Suspenseful Romantic Heart-TuggerTelluride Update: Buyers Lining Up for Divisive "Under the Skin," Strong Debut "Palo Alto" and Provocative "Starred Up" (Trailer)Venice Film Festival 2013 Review: "Gravity"Venice Film Festival 2013 Review: "Joe," Starring Nicolas CageVenice Film Festival 2013 Review: "Tracks," Starring Mia...

With "The Grandmaster" hitting theaters, the Toh! team reviews and ranks the best of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai, whose output is just ten features (along with many shorts) since 1988. But first, we have an introduction to Wong's oeuvre from Asia Film wonk David Chute: Origin Story: Wong Kar-wai BeginsI first saw Wong Kar-wai's early movies over thirty years ago, in theaters in Los Angeles' Chinatown and the San Gabriel Valley, when they were first released in the 1980s. I knew him, you could say, before he was Wong Kar-wei.Wong made his debut as a director in 1988, several months after a "midsection" supplement of articles I had edited, "Made in Hong Kong," was published in "Film Comment. (One excellent piece from that package is available online.) Prior to that he was off the fan radar, a hard-working commercial screenwriter in the Hk industry, cranking out mostly fluffy...

I watch "Game of Thrones" every week with my ex-husband David Chute, who reviews the show for Toh! and has also read the George R.R. Martin tomes. I need him on hand to explain things to me. (Did Sam leave the special obsidian knife that kills white walkers behind on the ground?) None of David's warnings about big pivot happenings in this week's episode could possibly prepare me for the events that unfolded. A number of knowing videographers knew what was coming and taped their pals watching the show, with dramatic results, especially among the women. Don't watch if you haven't see Episode 9 yet. Chute's spoiler free review is here. And @redweddingtears on Twitter offers grief therapy for disconsolate Red Wedding viewers.

This year I finally went to the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (Iffla). It took me 11 years of urging by my friend and former employee Carla Sanders, a festival guru, who works there and whose festival career began with "the two Garys" the founders of Filmex which was Los Angeles' first film festival in the 70s and 80s and one of the greatest shows on earth. In its second year The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie closed Filmex '72, and Luis Buñuel attended his first-ever public screening of one of his films. I won't go into this piece of history except to say it spawned the American Cinemateque and AFI Fest. The two Garys (Gary Essert and Gary Abraham) passed on, both victims of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic that hit the artistic community very hard, wiping out a generation of innovative filmmakers and film curator/ historians in Los Angeles.

The opening night of Iffla reminded me somewhat of Filmex with the glory of the filmmakers on the red carpet, beautiful young stars in glitzy clothes and skyscraper tall high heels, being stopped for interviews, flashbulbs going off and a general yet genteel excitement in the air. Even those interviewing were worth watching. It was different because all the stars were Indian which made this affair rather exotic at the same time.

The opening film, Gangs of Wasseypur, which had shown last year in the Cannes Film Festival, was truly extraordinary and the director Anurag Kashyap spent at least an hour talking to the audience about this film which is reminiscent of The Godfather and Gangs of New York though not at all derivative. Its second part showed the following evening and was equally outrageously original. Again the director spent an hour in the Q&A. He spoke to his move to Bombay as a filmmaker and the return to his own roots in telling the story of Wasseypur where he in fact grew up. The film actually is an analysis of the place's history and evolution as a burning inferno as the fight for the coal industry fuels the feud. From digging coal to killing someone in an innocuous brawl, the tale of vengeance runs parallel to the tale of India itself.

The 5 hours and 20 minutes were riveting. The music and dancing was also outrageous. Our friend Deborah Young of The Hollywood Reporter called it, "A dizzying explosion of an Indian gangster film, whose epic structure and colorful, immoral killers capture the imagination for over five hours."

David Chute, quoted in Thompson on Hollywood, says "Gangs is headlong, hand-held, violent entertainment. It manages to keep a dozen major characters and their agendas clear while rarely pausing to take a breath. It is also one of those rare movies that acknowledge the influence of movies and other forms of pop culture in shaping the values and motivations of its characters.

The story was actually based upon fact, a story of revenge over three generations of two families in a small city of India. My surprise and reaction to it reminded me of how I felt when I saw John Woo's The Killers in Toronto in 1989 which opened the door to John Woo in the U.S. (Coincidently it was the same David Chute who brought John Woo to the U.S. as I recall). The international sales agent, Elle Driver, has not made a sale in the U.S. Which surprises me.

Iffla concluded on Sunday evening (April 14) with a red carpet and gala fete that included the Los Angeles premiere of Deepa Mehta’s Midnight's Children, and the presentation of the festival's Grand Jury and Audience Choice Awards, followed by an after party.

This year the festival showcased more than 35 film features, documentaries, and short films at ArcLight Hollywood, home of Iffla since its inception. “The awards are always bittersweet for all of us in the programming team as we truly believe in the exceptional talent and relevance of each film which has been so carefully chosen,” said Lead Programmer Terrie Samundra. “That being said, we wholeheartedly share the enthusiasm of the audience and our prestigious jury. A huge congratulations to the winners!”

Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely took home the Grand Jury Prize for Best Feature, with an honorable mention for Ship of Theseus directed by Anand Gandhi. The Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary went to Sushrut Jain for Beyond All Boundaries, and for Best Short to Unravel directed by Meghna Gupta, with an honorable mention for Tatpaschat directed by Vasudev Keluskar.

Audience Awards

Best Feature: Filmistaan directed by Nitin Kakkar

Best Documentary: Beyond All Boundaries directed by Gotham Chopra

Best Short: Unravel directed by Meghna Gupta

The 2013 feature film jurors were International Director of the Feature Film Program at the Sundance Institute Paul Federbush, director/editor/writer Kanika Myer (Halo, Heart Of India), and Assistant Curator of Film Programs at Lacma Bernardo Rondeau.The Best Documentary Award was decided by The Hollywood Reporter and Los Angeles Times film critic Sheri Linden, Senior Programmer at Film Independent Maggie Mackay, and Producer Nadine Mundo (Chelsea Settles). Judging the short films were filmmaker and Iffla alum Prashant Bhargava (Patang), Film Curator and Director of Industry Programming at Palm Springs ShortFest Kathleen McInnis, and actress Sheetal Sheth (Abcd, Looking For Comedy In The Muslim World).

About Iffla

Now in its 11th year, the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (Iffla) is a nonprofit organization devoted to a greater appreciation of Indian cinema and culture by showcasing films, honoring entertainment industry business executives, and promoting the diverse perspectives of the Indian diaspora.

The six-day festival is the premiere platform for the latest in cutting edge global Indian cinema and bridges the gap between the two largest entertainment industries in the world – Hollywood and India. The festival showcased over 35 films from the Indian filmmaking community across the globe, hosted the highly anticipated opening and closing red carpet galas, and the closing awards ceremony.

For more information:

http://www.indianfilmfestival.org.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/indianfilmfestival

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iffla...

It's quiet out there, says David Chute. Too quiet."I'm starting to get a bad feeling about this"--as characters are too often moved to suggest on genre shows less consistently well-written than The Walking Dead. It's not that the show has suffered a precipitous falling off just since last week. But what came to mind unbidden last night, while watching Season 2, Episode 2, were key TV shows of my childhood, such as The Fugitive, in which the ostensible premise (the hunt for the one-armed man) was really just a pretext to get the central character on the road, essentially as a hobo, wandering around having loosely connected adventures. Contemporary cable shows tend to be more tightly plotted, but the basic situation of Wd is loose ...

David Chute wants you to hoist a few in honor of Strike Back, and it's not just an excuse to drink: this short-spoken Cinemax show actually has a lot to say.The first question for the fans is: Does it add up? Did it make sense? And then: How do we feel about the way the surviving Section 20 team members responded? Lifting a glass to the departed in a case like this, I’d argue in the affirmative on all points, and would go a step further: Understanding why this ending works for Strike Back is to understand what the series, at heart, has always been about. Strike Back is all about speed, some viewers would say, about pitching everything from violence to sex to interpersonal ...

David Chute leaves Atlantic City behind to re-locate in Atlanta and follow the post-zombie-apocalypse refugees on the road to Fort Bening.It isn’t the most original show on television. In fact, the post-apocalyptic survival epic The Walking Dead could be written off, if you were so inclined, as a mash up of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its sequels and Stephen King’s The Stand, as a plague of flesh-eating zombies gnaws the human race down to a bloody stump, to a close-knit band of hardy survivors. (Romero is the Bram Stoker of the flesh-eating-zombie sub-genre.) Feature films from The Day of The Triffids to Children of Men and I Am Legend, and the current TV shows Falling Skies and Terra Nova, and many ...

David Chute finds surprising beauty in television's best action drama.Director Daniel Percival has no need for 3-D. He can define a space with the parallax of a brief dolly shot. His staging of an incursion into a mammoth bunker complex under a forest in Chechnya adds a sweep of operatic grandeur to the penultimate ninth episode of Strike Back, the twisty action and drama series recently renewed by Cinemax. After a blast cuts off their escape, Section 20 comrades Scott and Stonebridge are forced go deeper and deeper into the earth, through claustrophobically narrowing staircases and oozing tunnels, until the complex opens out into a series of eerie vaulted caverns. The huge spaces have a menacing grandeur that’s appropriate to the way the stakes have ...

Boardwalk Empire has been given the greenlight by HBO for Season 3. HBO programming president Michael Lombardo says that after the first season: "I was eager to see what Terry Winter, Martin Scorsese and the rest of their stellar team had in store, and they continue to surpass our highest expectations. The response from the media and our viewers has been extremely gratifying.” The 1920s set prohibition drama recently won eight Emmy awards (including Outstanding Directing - Martin Scorsese), two Golden Globes (Best TV Series and Best Actor - Steve Buscemi), and two SAG Awards (Ensemble Performance and Best Actor - Steve Buscemi) earlier this year. Boardwalk Empire was created by Terence Winter (The Sopranos). HBO has also renewed True Blood, Game of Thrones and Treme. Critic David Chute reviews and recaps the series each week.

Walking the Atlantic City boards this week, David Chute is only mildly annoyed.The show should be generating a lot more suspense, at this point, as Nucky Thompson’s enemies (a significant percentage of them driven by long-festering family resentments) move to choke off his sources of supply (with help from the Coast Guard) and chase off his customers (Jimmy’s buddy Al, in Chicago, may have helped out with this, although ambiguity remains). The problem comes into focus when Stephen Graham’s peppy and oddly likable Capone visits the Boardwalk and gives the sluggish proceedings a temporary jolt of energy, like a visitor from the much livelier gangster movie that’s being shot on the soundstage across the street. When Nucky asks Al how his boss, Johnny Torio is ...

David Chute is happy to report that Strike Back has been re-upped.Cinemax action hit Strike Back will be back to strike again in 2012, powered by strong ratings and a growing cadre of passionate fans – including many who held mock funerals when 24 was canceled. Actually I made that last past up, but as the drive to prevent terrorist mastermind Latif (Jimi Mistry) from setting off a Wmd races toward its finale, the state of suspended animation that viewers settle into between installments is strikingly familiar. My prediction is that Sb, too, will be an even bigger hit on DVD than on first broadcast, with viewers devoting entire lost weekends to the adventures of Section 20 operatives Scott and Stonebridge. And just to make ...

Although not an ardent fan, David Chute nevertheless finds quite a few things to like in the second episode of the second season of Boardwalk Empire.Both my editor and I, here at Toh, are fans of the episode-by-episode commentary that critic Tim Appelo wrote for indieWIRE last year, during the first season of Terence Winter’s sprawling, ambitious period gangster chronicle Boardwalk Empire. Not myself a fan quite as deep-dyed as Tim, I’ve elected to try a variation on his dive-right-in approach to covering the series week by week. Leaving aside overarching issues of theme and character, I’ll be writing simply and only about the scenes and lines and encounters and details in each episode that I’ve actually really liked. Here’s this week’s list of some ...

Strike Back's heroes are far from perfect; reviewer David Chute admires their resilience in responding to the unexpected. “Is this normal?” asks an appalled European Union hostage in Kosovo at the midpoint of Episode 7 of Strike Back. It's an obvious question, after the third or fourth wrenching plot reversal has turned everything upside down yet again; when everything is right on the verge of going irretrievably Fubar. Section 20 operative Damien Scott (Sullivan Stapleton), in a grace-under-pressure, “come to think of it” sort of way, says, "well, yeah." For Scott and his comrade in arms, Michael Stonebridge (Philip Winchester), this life-threatening swirl of menace, this sense of being trapped inside a cyclone, is just another day at the office. Dropped from the sky into ...

As its second season begins, David Chute finds that he admires Boardwalk Empire but does not love it.We took it as a sign during Boardwalk Empire’s first season that the show’s fabulously expensive exterior and interior sets never felt lived in. Compare Boardwalk’s boardwalk, a beautiful sweep of CG-enhanced Hollywood carpentry, with Deadwood’s Deadwood, an assortment of tents and swaybacked outhouses, awash in mud and dust and struggling humanity. Even the Harlan County, Kentucky, of Justified, cobbled together from various locations in Southern California, conveys a more organic sense of place. The characters are convinced that they were born and raised and rooted there, and so do we. As its second season begins, Boardwalk remains a show that we admire more than we love, by ...

Strike Back is an action drama, writes David Chute, that continues to work effectively at both levels.Actor Philip Winchester gets a nice showcase for the tightly-wound intensity of his character, Sas ninja Michael Stonebridge, in the sixth episode of the lean and mean Sky/Cinemax action drama “Strike Back”--reminding us in the process that this Mid-Atlantic adaptation of a hit British series has men at the top (writer-producer Frank Spotnitz and director-producer Daniel Percival) who take the drama side of the equation as seriously as the action stuff--which kicks ten kinds of ass on a weekly basis, with occasional sharp clicks up to eleven. Stonebridge is emerging as a man who may have too many ties to the sanity of ordinary life to be able to ...

Wet work in the Sudan, writes David Chute, requires both a stubborn streak and a thick skull.One odd aspect of Strike Back’s storytelling about elite special forces commandos is that noticeably often it’s hinged upon one or both of the two main characters screwing up, often at the cost of a life or two. Episode 5, for example, gets off to a impressively fast, bloody, compressed start, goosed along by some clever quick cutting and an interpolated mini-flashback--but then in quick succession both of Section 20’s frontline covert operatives, Michael Stonebridge (Philip Winchester) and Damien Scott (Sullivan Stapleton), are dry-gulched and clobbered during a cat-and-mouse shooting match at a container port. The operatives do succeed in nabbing their immediate target, an arms dealer named Crawford ...

David Chute salutes Strike Back's commanding officer.Amanda Mealing, the actress who plays Colonel Eleanor Grant, chief of the covert ops unit Section 20 on Strike Back, gets off the single best shot, the final one, in episode 4 of this quick-witted series. The coiled fury behind that head shot, the way it's staged and played, even more than the extra-legal step that's being taken, creates the kind of seismic moment on a show that changes our interpretation of everything we've seen, our sense of what's at stake and the kind of people we're dealing with. This one was not as exciting overall as some of the earlier installments. Right up to the explosive death of a major character (we did warn you) it was mostly ...

David Chute bids Torchwood: Miracle Day a fond farewell. Honestly.An antipodal cleft pierces the earth, along a line drawn from Shanghai to Buenos Aires. Into this cleft the blood of an immortal (you know who) is introduced, and it has to be at both poles simultaneously. The effect of this transfusion is to re-jigger the polarity of the cleft, reconfiguring the force field it generates, toggling a morphic resonator switch that had the effect of making everyone who was mortal at that moment immortal and vice versa--meaning that Y.K.W. became mortal, because he was immortal to begin with and the polarity had been flipped. Are e clear so far? I’m having a laugh, as I suspect quite a few other fans did as they watched ...

David Chute wishes he was in Shanghai.The plan was to spell out what I meant by that title, but on second thought it might be more fun to make a contest out of it. Readers who figure out the reference and its relevance to the next-to-the-last episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day will receive absolutely nothing for their pains except bragging tights. But when fans gather, isn't that what it's all about? This was the episode in which The Blessing, long rumored, finally made a personal appearance--a fairly impersonal Pa, though, if you think about it, because what the thing looked like (one of the things it looked like) was a cavernous, sparkly geological formation, as if the entire planet was one gigantic geode and we ...

Don't take anything for granted, warns David Chute, as you wait an extra week for the resolution of the latest Strike Back cliffhanger. No new episode tonight of TV's new best action series. Instead, Cinemax is running a mini-marathon of the first three episodes of Strike Back, beginning at 10 p.m. Those already watching will have to continue gnawing their fingernails until Friday, September 9. Only then will they find out if Damien Scott has been blown to bits by the bomb strapped to his chest in a barn somewhere in South Africa by ex-ira-turned-freelance terrorist Daniel Connolly. No spoilers here--but I do want to suggest that the down to earth approach of this show is such that anything is possible. No predictions, just an ...

Don't take anything for granted, warns David Chute, as you wait an extra week for the resolution of the latest Strike Back cliffhanger. No new episode tonight of TV's new best action series. Instead, Cinemax is running a mini-marathon of the first three episodes of Strike Back, beginning at 10 p.m. Those already watching will have to continue gnawing their fingernails until Friday, September 9. Only then will they find out if Damien Scott has been blown to bits by the bomb strapped to his chest in a barn somewhere in South Africa by ex-ira-turned-freelance terrorist Daniel Connolly. No spoilers here--but I do want to suggest that the down to earth approach of this show is such that anything is possible. No predictions, just an ...

Action series Strike Back goes to Africa, and David Chute likes it.South Africa plays itself, rather than standing in for India or Afghanistan, in the third episode of the excellent Strike Back. This dense and propulsive counter-terrorism action series (based on a novel by former Sas officer Chris Ryan), a Sky/Cinemax cross-pond co-production based in Johannesburg, location-jumps from inner city shanty towns that could be in Kingston or Mumbai, to red-earth desert landscapes that echo the Spanish scrub of the Sergio Leone westerns, but with a richer color palette. It makes a perfect, picturesque backdrop for the activities of covert operatives who have replaced the quaint old gentlemanly concept of a license to kill with the much more through and goal-oriented notion of the kill ...

David Chute is wishing that some of the lead characters in Torchwood: Miracle Day would just die already.One measure of the excellence of “Immortal Sins,” the previous, seventh episode of the BBC/Starz mini-series Torchwood: Miracle, is that it ended with a burning question whose answer actually mattered to us. It turned out that Jack’s lover of the 1920s, Angelo Colasanto (Daniele Favilli) was still alive more than eighty decades later, and had grown rich enough to send a car and several employees after him. But what on earth would he look like, now, all those years later? Immortal and still young, or impossibly old – still alive, perhaps, like many others, only because of the Miracle, but not the Angelo that, you could tell, Jack ...

Animatronic aliens hit Torchwood: Miracle Day, reports critic David Chute: After episode seven, no one will be able to argue any longer that Miracle Day “isn’t Torchwood”--not without revealing themselves to be terminally full of shit. There’s even a small and memorably nasty animatronic alien on display, which is supposedly an iron clad indication or orthodoxy – although, thankfully MD seems to be stopping far short of pinning the underlying global health care conspiracy on aliens. Resorting to that creaky Sf equivalent of a deus ex machina would be an act of desperation unworthy of a creator and showrunner as cool as Russell T Davies. “Immortal Sins” is the most tightly plotted T:md episode so far, and the most romantic. Its centerpiece is a beautifully ...

Still mourning the demise of 24, action fan David Chute finds his bliss on Cinemax.At some point I will have to devote some major word count to the work of frequent Strike Back director Daniel Percival. In my youth I was a dedicated action aficionado, with enthusiasms that have moved from Don Siegel and Sam Peckinpah to George Miller and John Woo. We can’t put Percival in the all-time category quite yet, in part because he doesn’t use battle sequences for displays of virtuosity. The firefights aren’t abstract exercises, for him. His action sequences are scenes of drama. They are horrendous ordeals that are happening to people who seem normal to him. He’ll give us a tight close up of a fighter’s face, just as ...

In the sixth episode of sci-fi series Torchwood: Miracle Day, writes David Chute, the series turns mystical. “If schemes and conspiracies are being plotted,” says Stuart Owens (Ernie Hudson), an executive at PhiCorp (big pharma personified), “they must be seen only as patterns, waves. Shifts that are either too small or too vast to be perceived. Someone is playing the system right across the planet with infinite grace.” Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), a formerly immortal Time Agent from the 51st century, nods over this, as he understands it. “The true face of evil,” they decide, “is the system itself.” Deep. Consolidating the gains of Episode 5, “The Categories of Life,” this sixth installment of Miracle Day, “The Middle Men,” written by X-Files vet John ...

Anglophile critic David Chute takes on yet another new Brit/American co-production, Cinemax's Strike Back. So fast-paced it makes 24 look sluggish, and with a brighter, livelier tone that embraces both multi-cultural inclusiveness and macho backslapping, the Sky/Cinemax, UK/Us co-production Strike Back is first rate pulp TV, with enough unexpected heart and authenticity to guarentee that its thrills are never cheap. A counter-terrorism action series, it probably isn’t grim or one-sided enough to be adopted by ideologues of any stripe, and it isn’t in the superhero business. Loud and fast and brightly colored, with sudden up-against-the-wall sex scenes that keep the volume turned up to eleven between the fire fights, it is also the kind of show about the military that focuses on the day-to-day stresses ...

David Chute reviews and recaps Episode Five of Torchwood: Miracle Day, "the loopiest of all TV shows," he writes (Spoilers): Both Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic fields and that most overused and probably least understood of futurist concepts, The Singularity, continue to get an affectionate squeeze from time to time on Torchwood: Miracle Day. It seems increasingly likely that both of these oxygen-deprived egghead ideas will turn out to be the explanation for something on this loopiest of all TV shows. The suspense is killing me. Sneering pedophile rapist and murderer Oswald Danes (Bill Pullman) , now a PR prop for omniverous multi-national drug giant PhiCorp, was called upon to play the Singularity card in Episode 5, “The Categories of Life,” during a scene at a mammoth ...

Torchwood: Miracle Day confounds and delights reviewer David Chute, in equal measure: An embarrassment of riches, in narrative terms, as Torchwood: Miracle Day continues. If the show has a single defining problem, so far, it’s overcrowding--it races through so many complicated plot twists, and downloads so much information on the fly, that we’re distracted from big moments that should reverberate a lot more. Case in point, this week: the arrival of our heroes, Jack and Gwen, a pair of world-savers from drizzly Britain, on the sands of Venice Beach, “at the edge of America,” accompanied by a graphic representing their creator. This would have been a wonderful moment; a memorable landmark for the program, if a real cleansing breath had been taken to savor it. ...

David Chute reviews Episode Three of Torchwood: Miracle Day. Torchwood has perhaps the roomiest pretext ever devised for an Sf TV show: weird stuff keeps spilling through a space time vortex in downtown Cardiff, Wales, and an intrepid band of imperial watchdogs (led by an immortal bi-sexual flyboy from the 51st century) has to prevent them from inconveniencing the human race. In addition to dealing with the various beasties that emerge from the vortex, the Torchwood team happily makes use of any chunks of alien technology that happen to slip through, such as the video camera contact lenses featured in a key sequence of “Dead of Night,” episode three of the current Starz/BBC mini-series Torchwood: Miracle Day, without feeling a need to explain or even ...

David Chute reviews the second installment of the BBC/Starz Sf mini-series Torchwood: Miracle Day. Even better than the first, episode two set a much faster pace, hop-scotching between subplots unfolding simultaneously on two continents and on a trans-Atlantic airliner jetting between them. This adrenaline rush of entertainment seems to be a direct result of the way in which creator Russell T. Davies chose to Americanize the show, a development that some British fans are already whining about. They couldn’t be more wrong. This mid-Atlantic cross-pollenization is the best thing that’s ever happened to TV’s most eccentric great show. Whether by design or simply because the this sort of things is in the air, now, the intrepid Yanks that Davies created to round out the central ...

David Chute reviews Torchwood: Miracle Day, the new Starz/BBC limited series, which launches Friday. Torchwood: Miracle Day signals its take-no-prisoners seriousness right off the bat. The premise is daring, almost too cosmic to ever be paid off satisfactorily. At the same moment all over the world, human beings stop dying. Illnesses that would have killed us in the past simply don’t, any longer, no matter how gruesome the damage inflicted on our hapless flesh. The SFX work, here, by Greg Nicotero and his crew, sometimes rises to Walking Dead levels of grisliness. A man trapped in a burning building is reduced to little more than a head and shoulders and a few trailing scraps of jerky--yet he still manages to squirm and whimper on a ...

A man who works with his hands is a laborer;

a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman;

but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.

Louis Nizer

In his indispensable film study text, Understanding Movies, Louis Gianetti held forth on what separated craftsmanlike directors from those who rise above the norm:

“…what differentiates a great director from one who is merely competent is not so much a matter of what happens, but how things happen…”

In other words, Gianetti continued, the difference was in how effectively the director used form – visual style, composition, editing, mise en scene, and the rest of the directorial toolbox – to “…embody (a film’s) content.”

But with the rise of big budget blockbusters in the 70s and 80s, there came the ascendancy of a breed of director for whom content mattered less than form.

Decades-long Doctor Who fan David Chute eagerly anticipated the Season Six premiere starring Matt Smith and Alex Kingston (trailer below), and made me and a pal watch it with him. I applaud his review, excerpted: Vastly shinier production values aside, this was a Monster of the Week, hide-in-a-tunnel adventure, a 1970s scarf and curls throwback. Monument Valley was little more than a handsome backdrop; no organic connection that I could see with the events that unfolded there. The aliens' trick of making you forget them the second you looked away mimicked without improving upon the Weeping Angels of the great Blink episode, which moved when you looked away. (Moffatt recycling Moffatt.) These days, when there are so many other things one can find to do ...

Amid all the hubbub over the casting of Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander in the Hollywood film version of the Millenium Trilogy, David Chute delivers a compelling argument for why Salander is a defining character for the ages. We shouldn't fuss over the different movies, Swedish or American, he asserts, because there will be more versions to come, ala James Bond, or yes, Sherlock Holmes: Fans should not be too quick to denounce as greed-heads Hollywood producers who envision the "Girl" series as a potential mystery/action franchise, one that could carry on telling new stories indefinitely--not when their inspiration could turn out to be the drafts and outlines for seven additional books left behind on the legendary laptop. That it was Larsson's plan, in the first instance ...