Sad, funny and acutely self-conscious, Noah Baumbach’s new movie is the sort of mordant character study that people imagine was common in the ’70s. Greenberg is unafraid to project a downbeat worldview or feature an impossible protagonist—I’d be hard put to name one as maddening as the eponymous antihero unless…
Lost boy John Hughes was inducted into the pantheon this month, when the Academy devoted a moving Oscar-night tribute to the departed writer-director. But do you actually remember being a teenage moviegoer in the 1980s? It wasn’t all some kind of wonderful. Hughes movies came out twice a year, if…
Matisse called the Barnes Foundation “the only sane place to see art in America.” But the clamor over moving one of the world’s foremost collections of impressionist, post-impressionist and modern art from its home in the bucolic suburb of Merion, Pennsylvania, to center city Philadelphia (4.6 miles away), has been…
There’s an obvious stunt element to the casting of The Runaways: a punked-up, barely legal Kristen Stewart and a still underage, barely dressed Dakota Fanning begging for street cred by playing dress-up as, respectively, Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, front girls of the oversexed ’70s-era teen proto-punk sensation, The Runaways…
In Pretty Woman, director Garry Marshall’s personal cinematic high score, the opening credits close (and the closing credits open) with the voice of a street freak, barely noticeable in wide shot, chanting an absurd mantra—”Welcome to Hollywood, land of dreams!” Twenty years later, Marshall dips into the same well to…
Though no one’s idea of an action film, Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax feels less charmingly aimless than its radically slight precursors Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2006). Have Bujalski’s feckless characters joined the workaday world? As its title suggests, Beeswax has a mild buzz of business—and busy-ness. Set in…
Agreeing at the insistence of a Corsican mob boss to suck and then slash a fellow inmate, newly jailed Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim)—poor, illiterate, a “dirty Arab” in the prison’s racist pecking order—gets what’s coming to him, but in a good way. Indeed, crime pays in A Prophet, the…
Better late than never—a bang-bang pulse-pounder predicated on the Bush administration’s deliberate fabrication of WMDs in Iraq. Paul Greengrass’ expertly assembled Green Zone has evidently been parked for some time on Universal’s shelf. Had the movie been released during the 2008 election season, it might have been something more than…
Walt Disney mulled an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for decades before producing an animated feature in 1951, although by all accounts, he didn’t much care for the prim little protagonist, let alone her supporting cast of “weird characters.” One wonders what Uncle Walt would have made of his studio’s…
All that remains of Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day is Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning performance, his baddest and best. The rest of the movie? A blustering stumble toward parody—an overwrought, operatic buddy-cop flip-flop also starring Ethan Hawke as the rookie put to the test again and again by the devil (Denzel) on…
Katie Jarvis, who makes her acting debut as a rabid teenager in writer-director Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, was discovered on an English railway station platform, yelling at her boyfriend. Whether Jarvis is a natural-born actress or is simply playing herself as Mia, a foul-mouthed, 15-year-old child of the Essex projects…
Cop Out establishes its movie lineage right away, with a slow-motion toe-to-head tilt up, set to The Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” of black-cop/white-cop buddies Jimmy and Paul swaggering stone-faced toward the camera. Director/editor Kevin Smith immortalizes his heroes as stock crime-flick badasses in their very first frame. So…
Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby’s parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his back…
The White Ribbon is Michael Haneke’s first German-language film since the original Funny Games (1997) and, addressing what used to be called “the German problem” while dodging the filmmaker’s own likability issues, it’s his best ever. A period piece set on the eve of World War I in an echt…
As personal assistant to the U.S. ambassador to France, James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) can keep himself in well-tailored suits and keep his terrific-looking kittenish girlfriend (Kasia Smutniak) in a nice Paris apartment. This is the basis for director Pierre Morel’s delicate study in trans-Atlantic manners, From Paris With Love,…
“Did you shoot my daughtah?” is the question posed, in flat-voweled Bostonian, in the trailer for Edge of Darkness. And Mel Gibson, much-bereaved and much-vengeful, from Hamlet to Ransom to Revolutionary America, sets out to settle another score. Gibson is Thomas Craven: veteran, homicide detective, lonesome widower. His daughter, a…
Recent American films about families, like last year’s Rachel Getting Married and Revolutionary Road, all too often pierce eardrums with unrelenting shrieks of dysfunction and misery. Amid the din, French filmmaker Claire Denis’ sublime 35 Shots of Rum stands out all the more for its soothing quiet, conveying the easy,…
Extraordinary Measures is a race-against-time thriller in which a desperate dad (Brendan Fraser) sacrifices everything to cure a rare disease that’s seconds away from killing his kids. Extraordinary Measures is also a heartwarming tale about a disgruntled doc (Harrison Ford) who throws in with a biotech startup fronted by…well, a…
A one-film cabinet of curiosities, The Lovely Bones turns the most successful CGI director of the ’00s loose on one of the decade’s prime literary phenomena: Cults collide as Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson tackles Alice Sebold’s best-selling New Age gothic, the story of a rape-murder-dismemberment and its aftermath,…
Directors Allen and Albert Hughes’ fourth film, The Book of Eli, centers on the Christianity that was at the margins of their previous films—hypocritically misused by Bokeem Woodbine’s bush-crazy Marine turned pulpit-pounder turned stick-up man in Dead Presidents, and the sanctimonious grandparents in Menace II Society. “I don’t think God…
Is this a commercial for the National Tourism Council of Ireland or for the conditioner Amy Adams uses in her hair? Either way, both look fabulous. Then there’s the movie, a soggy affair directed with no great enthusiasm by Anand Tucker. Leap Year draws its dubious premise from a supposed…
For years, Hollywood has wrestled with adapting C.D. Payne’s 1993 novel Youth in Revolt—which, actually, was three novels collected under one title. In 1996, Fox filmed a pilot starring Chris Masterson as Nick Twisp, the 14-year-old “I’m Single, Let’s Mingle” T-shirt-sporting, foreign-film-watching, Frank Sinatra-listening, Oakland-stuck virgin from Payne’s book. Jane…
