The Tourist Gawks at its Stars, Visits Venice, Has Twist.

Men follow Angelina Jolie in The Tourist. Men and cameras. They follow her — chic, coiffed, assless—through the streets of Paris. They follow her onto the train to impossible, floating Venice, where she heads on the instruction of her shadowy, fugitive lover. Eventually, they follow fellow passenger Johnny Depp as…

I Love You Phillip Morris: Jim Carrey and Crew Go Balls-Out.

It’s taken almost two years for the bonkers, exhilarating same-sex romantic comedy I Love You Phillip Morris to finally reach theaters. Premiering at Sundance in January 2009, the movie was a near-casualty of nervous-nellie U.S. distributors—more comfortable with innocuous gay genres like the homosexual weepie or the martyr biopic—and countless…

Narnia: An Ailing Franchise Gets Another Chance

A massive project, taken up lightly by Disney in the giddy post-Lord of the Rings atmosphere and dropped upon failing to return the requisite billions, this third adaptation from C.S. Lewis’s seven-volume (!) Chronicles of Narnia comes underwritten by a new studio, 20th Century Fox, and with a new director,…

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within: Profile of a Counterculture Saint

In Yony Leyser’s documentary hagiography—which ends with John Waters nominating its subject for iconoclast-artist sainthood—William Seward Burroughs’ literary efforts are of secondary interest, noted for their influence on rock lyrics and band names. In the main, celebrity talking heads have gathered here to celebrate Burroughs’ life as an 83-year masterpiece…

Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: A Dull, Soft-Core Cocktail

Airily disregarding the Hemingway Unadaptability Principle, this quaintly racy version of Papa’s most hated novel has a few bullets in its barrel: Dynasty scion Jack Huston, as the Hem avatar, is dull but physically a perfect fit, the Mediterranean tourist-porn is addictive and the story, unique in this particular corpus,…

Black Swan: Natalie Portman Goes Batshit in a Tutu.

A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp—at the very least, it’s the most risible and riotous backstage movie since Showgirls. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake has had a spooky quality at least since Tod Browning appropriated a few bars of…

Client 9: Investigating Eliot Spitzer’s Own Worst Enemies.

The usually silver-tongued Eliot Spitzer, political hero of last month’s Inside Job and now ubiquitous media personality, stammers and hesitates when asked to explain the psychosexual motivations behind his spectacular flameout in Alex Gibney’s gripping Client 9—or, if you prefer, Inside Blowjob. Spitzer, whose tireless efforts to redeem himself led…

Burlesque Squanders Its Hottest Asset: Xtina.

“She doesn’t sing that way because she’s had it easy.” This is how Tess (Cher), the long-suffering owner of the nightclub at the center of Burlesque, defends her new star Ali (Christina Aguilera) to the club’s jealous deposed marquee attraction, Nikki (Kristen Bell). The same phrase could substitute as a…

Welcome to the Rileys: Kristen Stewart and the Birth of an Anti-Star.

Some young actors yearn for that flashy role in a blockbuster movie that will prove their bankability to a doubting Hollywood. Kristen Stewart, on the other hand, seems determined to accentuate her anti-star bona fides, delivering aggressively affectless interviews and bracketing this summer’s $300 million-earning Twilight: Eclipse with two grittier…

The Next Three Days: Paul Haggis Shows No Improvement.

What if we choose to exist solely in a reality of our own making?” asks Pittsburgh community-college lit professor John Brennan (Russell Crowe) rhetorically during a discussion of Don Quixote in The Next Three Days, Paul Haggis’ fourth effort as director. Like his lumpy protagonist, Haggis, who also scripted this…

Boxing Gym: Frederick Wiseman’s Doc Scores a Knockout.

“I was recently sitting with a group of French directors, and at a certain point the conversation turned to Fred Wiseman,” critic Kent Jones wrote eight years ago in Film Comment. “Without hesitation, everyone agreed that he was probably America’s greatest living filmmaker”—not to mention the world-champion practitioner of the…

127 Hours: James Franco Between a Rock and a Hard Place.

Other people besides James Franco appear in 127 Hours, but as they’re unimportant, they will not be mentioned in this review. Danny Boyle’s film—based on the story of Aron Ralston, who in 2003 cut off his own arm after being stuck for five days under a rock in a Utah…

Morning Glory: Married to the Job.

In the climax of Morning Glory, Rachel McAdams is dressed in a flesh-colored, diaphanous cocktail dress, its halter top and tight bodice giving way to spilling tulle. This is the kind of dress a screen heroine wears when a slow-building love plot is coming to a head; it is the…

Cool It: Blowing Hot Air at Global Warming

The science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard-sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjorn Lomborg. Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the movie’s eponymous source book, the Danish adjunct professor of statistics became, over the past decade, a thorn in…

Rivette Gets the Gang Back Together Again for Around a Small Mountain

Around a Small Mountain travels with an itinerant one-ring circus of proud artisans, performing to shrinking rural crowds. “We’re the last classics,” announces one. And after a long and stubbornly marginal career heading his creative family, 82-year-old director Jacques Rivette nears closing time with this commedia dell’arte. Leads Sergio Castellitto…

An Intimate Look at the Price Families Pay for China’s Miracle

Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan’s prize-winning documentary Last Train Home is an intimate portrait of an unfathomable immensity, focusing on a single family caught up in the world’s largest mass migration. Opening overhead shots show a huge mob waiting in the rain to push their way into China’s Guangzhou railroad station…

Nazi Propaganda Laid Bare in A Film Unfinished.

Does it matter that a young Israeli filmmaker’s imaginative reconstruction of an abandoned Nazi propaganda film about the Warsaw Ghetto is not, strictly speaking, a documentary? Not if it sets a crucial historical record straight. Discovered by East German archivists after World War II and accepted for decades as one…

Due Date: Zach Galifianakis Steals Another Todd Phillips Buddy Comedy

In Due Date, a skinny, scowly and dryly self-referential Robert Downey Jr. meets a chubby, beardy, quasi-autistic Zach Galifianakis boarding a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Downey plays Peter, a Bluetoothed architect with a very pregnant wife (Michelle Monaghan) waiting at home for him; Galifianakis’ Ethan is a would-be…