Mike Judge began writing the screenplay for Extract not long after Office Space opened and closed in a matter of weeks in the late winter of 1999. The two movies were always intended as bookends, with Extract countering the earlier film’s woe-is-me tale of the put-upon prole with its fucked-am-I…
It Might Get Loud
Marketed as a guitar summit between The Edge, Jimmy Page and Jack White, Davis Guggenheim’s affectionate, intermittently insightful behind-the-music doc is more electric triptych than meeting of the minds. Yes, the trio gather ’round the soundstage amps to teach each other a few tricks, but it’s anticlimactic—save for the schoolboy…
Your enjoyment of My One and Only will depend on how much the words “inspired by incidents in the life of actor and Hollywood icon George Hamilton” spark swoony memories. Star of Love at First Bite and Zorro, the Gay Blade, the Suntanned One executive-produced this benign coming-of-ager about the…
“If you remember Woodstock, you probably weren’t there,” the expression goes. And if you were, can you please stop gassing on about it? Aquarian Nostalgia™ is the most oppressively sanctimonious and dull stripe of reminiscing. Sure, the three free days of peace and music at Max Yasgur’s farm passed without…
Finally, there’s a vampire movie worthy of the title The Hunger—even if it arrives under the more potable name Thirst. Carnal appetite, not a parched palate, is the accelerant that fuels this perverse, prankish and merrily anti-clerical exercise in bloodletting from Park Chan-wook, the South Korean director whose films function…
Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is consummate Hollywood entertainment—rich in fantasy and blithely amoral. It’s also quintessential Tarantino—even more drenched in film references than gore, with a proudly misspelled title (lifted from Italian genre-meister Enzo Castellari’s 1978 Dirty Dozen knockoff) to underscore the movie’s cinematic hyperliteracy. Tepidly…
Sophie Barthes’ clever metaphysical comedy Cold Souls has been dubbed “Being Paul Giamatti” more than once since its Sundance 2009 debut. But if comparisons to the films of Charlie Kaufman are inevitable, the similarities only go so far. Sure, Paul Giamatti plays “Paul Giamatti,” another “real” actor unwittingly embroiled in…
In the same week that the South African import District 9 gives us a Johannesburg beset by alien invaders, the latest film by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki envisions a small Japanese port town turned upside-down by visitors from the bottom of the sea. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The…
The aliens have been with us for 20 years already at the start of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mothership and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the space…
It was the best of movies. It was the worst of movies. Which is to say: There’s half of a great movie in Julie & Julia—but since Meryl Streep has already starred in one titled Julia, perhaps it was merely necessary to tack on the “Julie” half to distinguish Nora…
As Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola’s baroque genealogical melodrama, reaches its appropriately hysterical denouement, Vincent Gallo fixes his pale gaze on young co-star Alden Ehrenreich and reassures him that “it’s going to be OK—we’re a family.” Gallo’s warmth is not altogether convincing, but for writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de…
I n the Loop doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the know. In Armando Iannucci’s movie, a satire of the run-up to war with a Middle Eastern country, it means that all the poor bastards are stuck in a loop, making the same bad decisions and tragic mistakes over and over…
After devoting his first two films as director, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, to getting laid and having kids, respectively, Judd Apatow brings the circle of life to a close with Funny People, which stars Adam Sandler as George Simmons, a popular, Sandler-esque movie star diagnosed with a rare…
In the lushly produced but dispiriting new comedy The Ugly Truth, Katherine Heigl stars as Abby Richter, a successful but hopelessly uptight TV producer who is also perpetually single. Ever efficient, Abby does background checks on the men she meets and takes along on the first date a 10-point checklist…
Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess that they’re too tired to procreate that night and then confess their mutual relief. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2 a.m…
Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering…
On the surface, (500) Days of Summer really is no different than, oh, let’s say The Proposal, in which Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock spun box-office gold from romantic comedy’s refrigerator fuzz. Former music-video maker Marc Webb’s feature debut is as conventional as any made-for-cable rom-com, down to its soft-indie-rock…
“Heterosexuals can’t understand camp, because everything they do is camp,” opined an associate of the old Playhouse of the Ridiculous, a New York theater known for its good-natured, anarchic sexual farce—a piece like Turds in Hell, which offered a farrago of sodomy, sadomasochism, incest, coprophagia, bestiality, homosexual behavior of every…
Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S…
Moon, directed by British advert tyro Duncan Jones, is a modest science fiction film with major aspirations. Jones’ debut is pleased to engage genre behemoths—2001, Solaris, Blade Runner—as well as B-movie classics such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The tale of a lonely spaceman might have made an excellent…
“They’re all about where people come from. Nobody seems to wonder where somebody’s going.” So says the Depression-era bank-robber-cum-folk-hero John Dillinger upon surveying the clientele of a chic Chicago eatery in a key scene from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. And, much like its subject, Mann’s exhilarating movie exists in a…
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a bewildering, noisy, sloppy, cynical piece of work, a movie that sneers at the audience for 147 minutes and expects us to lap it up as entertainment—and be grateful. This is blockbuster porn absent even the suggestion of care or concern for anything that…
