i watched 'bad education' a few nights ago - i think i never saw it when it was in theatres because of a bad review in the voice. i think i was also really turned off by the promo photos of gael garcia bernal in drag - it seemed to be a campy drag queen movie mixed with a pedophilic priest tragedy, and who wants to see that?

what a mistake - the movie was as good as anything almodovar has done. i love how he really revels in colors in his choice of costumes and sets, even when the tone and mood are fairly somber (see 'all about my mother'). also gael garcia bernal can really act (and is really HOT).

my method of reading reviews and making decisions goes thus: i skim the times, the new yorker, the village voice and formulate an average from the three. awhile ago steve and i were talking about who the best film reviews are - i like a.o., manohla, kenneth turan, but anthony lane is a master of film criticism. from one of my favorite reviews, of revenge of the sith:

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in “Gremlins” when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink—squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,” he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we’re here, what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give.