REVIEW: Big Sur [2013]

“The circle’s closed in on the old heroes of the night” I’ve never read a novel by Jack Kerouac—the only Beat Generation tome I have leafed through is William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch—but I imagine the experience is similar to that of watching director Michael Polish’s adaption of the author’s 1962 work, Big Sur. About eighty-five percent driven by voiceover narration assumedly being read directly out of the book to be heard above a sprawling Explosions in the Sky-lite score from The National and gorgeously composed images of the On…

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REVIEW: All the Pretty Horses [2000]

“I have no honor but my promise” I shied away from Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses because the Weinsteins had billed it as a romance and all I had read said it was terrible. Now, almost a decade since its release, and the addition of two stellar films based on Cormac McCarthy novels, I had to take a look back. Watching No Country for Old Men and The Road does not give you a feeling that anything written by the guy could be something other than dark and…

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