Adapted from Muriel Barbery’s international best-seller The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Mona Achache’s first film, The Hedgehog, follows two parallel storylines: one featuring a thoroughly insufferable little girl, the other a pleasingly grumpy middle-aged widow. Scrawny, bespectacled, precocious 11-year-old Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic), disgusted by the futility of her bourgeois…
Wholly unrelated to the 1975 Sam Peckinpah film of the same name, Killer Elite is distinguished by one no-mercy, eye-gouging, testicle-punching brawl, and one whoppingly indifferent screenplay. After a collateral-damage close call awakens his conscience — the first of many perfunctorily recycled bits to come — hitman Danny Bryce (Jason…
Once upon a time, Peter Gatien ruled clubland in New York. With spots such as Limelight and Tunnel, the impresario who wore an eye patch figured out all the post-Studio 54 strategies for getting people to queue up in order to empty their pockets. Chances are you know this already,…
Do you have the Gang together? Have you brushed up on your: Danny DeVito Tanned baby Cocaine priest Huffing Waitress infatuation Questionable coaching methods Creepy, creepy rivals Well, HAVE YOU? All of it could be on tonight’s quiz. You don’t know. We don’t know. We’re about to have a Charlie…
Rush Week is upon us. Did you hear me? Rush Week. While some of you are responding with, “What the hell is Rush Week?” others are either cringing in fear or donning facial expressions of apathy and disinterest without even trying. No matter your response to fraternities (school-sanctioned or otherwise),…
We’re watching Bravo’s Most Eligible Dallas every week so you don’t have to. The fourth episode finds formerly minor characters becoming thunder thieves. Read on. Most Eligible Dallas made its triumphant televised return on Monday after taking a week off for reasons I know not but support nonetheless. So, I’ll…
We’re not going to get the picks right, necessarily, but we’ve clocked serious hours watching the tube, so we feel like we’ve got insight into what “the people” want in their Emmy-winners. You know, “the people.” The couch people. The people who have cut their lifespans with a remote control…
Back in June, the first trailer for Girl with the Dragon Tattoo landed on the tangled interwebs, teasing those of us who can’t wait for the December 21 release of the film. Well, there’s another movie we can’t wait to see, and thankfully it’ll hit the big screen a month…
As stripped-down and propulsive as its robotic title, Drive is the most “American” movie yet by Danish genre director Nicolas Winding Refn. The film, for which Refn was named best director last May in Cannes, is a sleek, tense piece of work that, as a vehicle for Ryan Gosling, has…
What I don’t know: why these movies keep getting made. I Don’t Know How She Does It is based on Allison Pearson’s 2002 diaristic comic bestseller and directed by Douglas McGrath. But its real auteur is screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, scripter of wan workplace romantic comedies such as the limp…
I recently sat down with director Nicolas Winding Refn to talk about his new film Drive, starring Ryan Gosling as Hollywood stunt driver by day and a getaway driver by night. Refn is one of those filmmakers that, if you’re a cinephile, you’ve likely heard of by now, with such…
In honor of Warrior (out in theaters this past weekend — so go see it … no, seriously, it’s really good), lets take a look back at some of the most epic male sibling rivalries in film history. After the jump, it’s brother against brother. And brother against brother against…
The cool thing about Kevin Bacon is that he doesn’t really seem like a movie star. He seems like, you know, a guy. The kind of guy it would be fun to hang out and shoot the shit with. He’s good looking, but not George Clooney good looking. He’s been…
Currently the fifth-to-last film on Steven Soderbergh’s ever-expanding pre-retirement slate, Contagion opens on day two of a global viral epidemic. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Beth Emhoff, an American employee for an ominously unspecific multinational corporation who returns from a business trip in Hong Kong to her wintry Midwestern home feeling like…
At one point in Higher Ground, Vera Farmiga’s decade-spanning directorial debut, the actress, playing Corinne, a woman still soaked with lake water after her baptism into an evangelical sect, resembles no less a touchstone than Ronee Blakley in Robert Altman’s Nashville: slightly high hair; starchy, sexless, long tunic dress; swaying…
Back in 1963, Andy Warhol pointed a small movie camera at his friend John Giorno, recorded him sleeping for six hours and released it as a six-hour film called Sleep. Warhol shot eight hours of the top of the Empire State Building and called it Empire. He filmed close-ups of…
We’re watching Bravo’s Most Eligible Dallas every week so you don’t have to. The fourth episode finds formerly minor characters becoming thunder thieves. Read on. Scene 1: Courtney and Tara meet for lunch at Toulouse. After a brief table-etiquette lesson from Court (FORK is on LEFT because both words have…
A group of thirtysomethings trapped in the amber of their high school years attempt to bone their way into adulthood in A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, an ensemble sex comedy written and directed by Larry Sanders Show writers Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck. Technically the orgy of the title is…
Ah, the season is upon us. Wait, what season, you ask? Halloween of course! If you’ve taken a gander at the date today, then you probably noticed that we are now exactly two months away from All Hallow’s Eve. Some of you may be the type who rush to your…
We’re watching Bravo’s Most Eligible Dallas every week so you don’t have to. The third episode finds Courtney in nice-making, flirty-flirty mode. New sensations! On with the show … Scene 1: Before we join Courtney’s morning hangover drama in progress, it’s important to note Bravo’s method of establishing setting. In…
A mysterious video sped onto the Internets over over the weekend, leaving nothing but flame trails and questions about its origins soon after it went viral. The video’s title: El DeLorean de Volver al Futuro en Cabildo y Juramento, which roughly translates to “This is heavy duty, Doc.” Seeing as…
Renaissance man Steve Martin will take the stage at the Meyerson Symphony Center tonight, but he won’t just be wielding a microphone. The funny man also happens to be an author, playwright, songwriter and Grammy-award winning banjo player, who has not one but two #1 bluegrass albums (The Crow and…
