New in Town She’s too thin. She’s a bobble-head. Her forehead doesn’t move. Where has that Jerry Maguire girl gone, the one we once knew and loved? It’s not easy being America’s Sweetheart. Nor any easier being Lucy Hill (Renée Zellweger), who’s unmarried, pushing 40, personal trainer-toned, living in a…
The crowds were thinner, the temperature warmer and Barack Obama’s name mentioned so many times that you might have thought he had assumed leadership not just of the free world, but the Sundance Institute too. Otherwise, it was business as relatively usual as the Sundance Film Festival turned 25. If…
Ari Folman’s broodingly original Waltz With Bashir is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature. Folman has created a grim, deeply personal phantasmagoria around the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Waltz With Bashir, named for Bashir Gemayel, the hero of the Christian militias that…
Inkheart Brendan “Kids’ Choice” Fraser returns to the multiplex day-care as “Mo” Folchart, antiquarian-book-repairman-cum-adventurer. In Inkheart’s opening chapter, he’s identified as a member of a race of “Silvertongues”—those who, when they read aloud, can suck people out of and into the texts that they’re reciting from. Mo has abstained from…
Notorious, about a crack dealer who becomes an iconic rapper who becomes a tragic legend, is the first film George Tillman Jr. has directed since 2000’s Men of Honor, about a sharecropper’s son who becomes the first black diver in the Navy who becomes the first amputee to return to…
And so the endless campaign wraps up with a flurry of virtual leaders. Richard Nixon will always be part of America’s dreamlife, with or without David Frost; the Bush II legacy will linger for years, even as W. addresses a yearning for closure. Like our president-elect, Milk arrives from left…
Will there be a special Academy Award for Best Aryan Costume Design this year? Everywhere you turn in the movies, it’s swastika flags and SS uniforms. Although the Holocaust movie has been on hiatus for a while, lately it seems as if everyone is trying to squeeze in their Schindler’s…
The Wrestler may be plenty visceral, but it’s no more a sports movie than professional wrestling is a competitive sport. Chronic overreacher Darren Aronofsky’s relatively unpretentious follow-up to the ridiculous debacle that was The Fountain is all about showbiz. It’s also a canny example. You want to make a comeback…
For as long as it forges ahead without explanations, The Unborn works in its way, as a series of snap-cut gotchas introducing each new contestant in its pageant of cold-sweat set-pieces. Often, this involves starlet Odette Yustman approaching some obscured, inevitably terrifying figure from behind very…very…slowly. Yustman plays Casey, a…
No writer ever gazed deeper or more despairingly into the prison of middle-class American conformity than Richard Yates, which may explain why none of his books sold more than 12,000 copies in his lifetime and why it’s taken more than 40 years for one of them to reach the big…
You’ve made the first movie of the Obama generation!” exclaimed an audience member as he rushed up to Clint Eastwood after a recent screening of Gran Torino. “Well,” the 78-year-old actor-director replied, without missing a beat, “I was actually born under Hoover.” It was an ironic juxtaposition, given that Eastwood’s…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is certainly curious—a modest F. Scott Fitzgerald story about a man born in the twilight of life and gradually regressing toward dawn that has been adapted into a two-ton, Oscar-season white elephant. Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Eric Roth, Benjamin Button…
Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg—a lot of name for a lot of guy. Born into aristocracy in 1907, he was a soldier by the age of 19—and, by most accounts, a warrior with the soul of a poet (he was especially smitten with the work of Stefan George,…
Like Doubt, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader is low-budget, high-profile and beamed straight at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Category of High Moral Tone. Only in this case, the stakes are way higher and the attitude muted to a fault. Based on a partly autobiographical novel by Bernhard…
Walt Kowalski growls a lot—a dyspeptic rumble that wells up from deep inside his belly when he catches sight of his midriff-baring teenage granddaughter text-messaging her way through her grandmother’s funeral, or when his good-for-nothing son and daughter-in-law suggest that he sell his house in a gang-infested corner of suburban…
For so major a movie star—at least, once upon a time—Jim Carrey seems to make a lot of awfully minor films, several of them over and over again. Isn’t Yes Man, in which Carrey’s self-absorbed Debbie Downer green-lights every bad decision in an effort to reinvent his sorry life, just…
Two years ago nearly to the day, Will Smith and Italian director Gabriele Muccino released The Pursuit of Happyness, one of the most underrated of recent Hollywood movies, which starred Smith as a single father navigating a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of San Francisco. Writing at the time, I…
I hear America singing, and I see…Richard Nixon. Not the man but the muse: Has any president since Lincoln inspired more movies, TV miniseries and operas? As Nixon’s beetle brows, ski nose and mirthless grin were made for caricature, so his rampant pathology was a gift for novelists and psycho-historians…
Back in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Boston, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn’t get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so I wasn’t altogether surprised…
Flying saucers just aren’t that scary anymore. Especially after Ed Wood and Mars Attacks, it’s hard to take a threat from a giant Frisbee all that seriously. So what’s an update of the iconic 1951 sci-fi flick, The Day the Earth Stood Still, to do? In an extremely bold move,…
First, a key spoiler: Cadillac Records is not the story of Chess Records, the blues label started in Chicago in 1950 by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess that featured among its stable of artists Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Etta James, plus many others who birthed…
Nobody in the film industry wants to be pigeonholed. Personal assistants long to be studio heads, gaffers want to direct, and name actors fantasize about hanging it up and doing something that, y’know, matters. In such an environment, director Randall Miller’s career is fairly typical. Using his 1990, feel-good film-school…
