The Rite is the latest of at least a dozen widely released American movies in half as many years with demonic possession a major plot point. This doesn’t mean the subject is wrung out—its continuing resonance with audiences hasn’t been effaced by secular pop psychology or modernization within the church…
Another Year, the 10th feature-length British soap written and directed by Mike Leigh, concerns a year in the life of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), the happiest post-middle-aged married couple in the whole of the London suburbs. Heading into their fifth decade together, Tom and Gerri are healthy…
Tracking the parallel trajectories of three employees laid off from cushy corporate jobs at the same Boston-based manufacturing conglomerate, The Company Men is transparent in its ambition to capture The Way We Live Now from a sensitive, equitable—rather than a withering and satiric—point of view. Writer/director John Wells portrays the…
Ivan Reitman, master of the high-concept, big-budget Hollywood comedy (Ghostbusters, Dave), would seem an unlikely candidate to direct No Strings Attached, an extremely low-concept, low-key romantic comedy of contemporary sexual mores centered on the dating foibles of attractive nerds. Fully devoid of the fantasy contrivance that often sets a Reitman…
They call it “human interest.” There are few narratives more compelling than a survival story like Peter Weir’s new adventure yarn. The protagonists of The Way Back, the veteran director’s first movie in the seven years since his seafaring Master and Commander, are a group of Soviet prisoners who escape…
“Maybe I should just tell you some of the facts as I remember them,” Spalding Gray says a few minutes into And Everything Is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh’s fascinating posthumous documentary on the writer/actor/monologist, who apparently jumped off the Staten Island Ferry in 2004. Soderbergh, who filmed the monologue Gray’s…
A 2009 Cannes winner, Dogtooth is hyperrealist sci-fi detailing an (anti)social experiment gone awry. The matriarch and patriarch of an upper-class Greek family have taught their three nameless, college-age offspring an alternate language (“A sea is a leather armchair, like the one we have in the living room. A pussy…
In her recent English-speaking roles, 50-year-old bilingual Kristin Scott Thomas has gamely endured the fate of most actresses her age, cast as the fretful mother of Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson in The Other Boleyn Girl and the pinched, sexless guardian of Aaron Johnson’s John Lennon in Nowhere Boy. Her…
Claire Denis’ strongest movie in the decade since Beau Travail, her tense, convulsive White Material is a portrait of change and a thing of terrible beauty. The time is unspecified. The subject is the collapse of an unnamed West African state, and the protagonist, Maria, a French settler unflinchingly played…
Writer-director Tanya Hamilton’s striking debut is the rare recent American-independent film that goes beyond the private dramas of its protagonists, imagining them as players in broader historical moments. Set in the Germantown section of Philadelphia in the summer of 1976, Night Catches Us examines the failed hopes of ’60s liberation…
Only inertia will bring people to Michel Gondry’s 3-D spectacle, The Green Hornet. Opening amid persistent negative buzz in the mid-January dead zone, this long-germinating prospective franchise, based on a character that first saturated the nation’s radio waves in 1939, seems pretty much DOA. Rather than a $90 million Gondry…
Dissolute action-movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), first seen doing laps in his black Ferrari, has no destination in Somewhere, Sofia Coppola’s mood ring of celebrity lassitude. Coppola’s fourth feature is, at times, similarly aimless and empty. But those who groan that the writer-director has made another indulgent film about…
When the MPAA handed Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine an NC-17 rating this fall, cynics suggested that the so-called “kiss of death” was better publicity for the gently experimental marriage drama than anything famously crafty distributor Harvey Weinstein could buy. When the rating was reversed this month—downgraded to an R without…
The late George Hickenlooper’s Casino Jack is an improbably blithe cautionary tale, recounting the rise and fall of D.C. superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. “You’re either a big-leaguer or you’re a slave clawing your way onto the C train,” the avid antihero (Kevin Spacey) tells his mirrored reflection in the pre-credit sequence;…
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire, John Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole plops us down in the lives of Becca (Nicole Kidman, who also produced) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart), fortyish bourgie marrieds rattling around an East Coast dream house. In the film’s first scenes, the couple acts out…
Boldly reanimating the comic Western that secured John Wayne his Oscar 41 years ago, the Coen brothers’ True Grit is well-wrought, if overly talkative, and seriously ambitious. Opening with a strategically abbreviated Old Testament proverb (“The wicked flee when none pursueth”), the film returns the Coens to the all-American sagebrush…
Just in time for the whole family to file into the multiplex on a silent Christmas night when there’s nowhere else to go: a return to the magnified dysfunction of the Focker household and the cozy holiday glow of some paychecking celebrities. This began a decade ago in Meet the…
An odd duck of a romantic comedy from James L. Brooks, How Do You Know strays as far from a barrel of laughs as a writer-director formed by network television can get without losing his grip altogether. The movie’s rhythms are loose, disjointed and peppered with strategic silences or half-finished…
Jeff Bridges is God and, as image-captured from the original 1982 Tron, he’s also the devil in Disney’s mega-million dollar reboot, Tron: Legacy. The notion of a tragically split persona might have been scripted to give the new movie a measure of emotional gravitas, but why bother with writing when…
The Fighter is based on the true story of Lowell, Massachusetts, light welterweight champ “Irish” Micky Ward, but, starring Boston working-class hero Mark Wahlberg, it plays as a Rocky-fied fairy tale for our time: Consigned to Palookaville, a sweet, unassuming boxer with more heart than brains steps up—all the way…
A picnic for Anglophiles, not to mention a prospective Oscar bonanza for the brothers Weinstein, The King’s Speech is a well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor. The story—shy young prince helped by irascible wizard to break an evil…
Rock-bottom expectations are rewarded, sort of, in this update of Hanna-Barbera’s necktied ursus, which hopes to outdo the live action/computer animation success of the Alvin and the Chipmunks franchise by adding one more dimension. Yogi (who debuted in 1958 and was loosely based on The Honeymooners’ Ed Norton) is voiced…
