“Never ask for what ought to be offered,” 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) tells her little brother in Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik’s dark and flinty Ozark fairy tale. Those are words to live by for Ree and her people, scattered across the hardscrabble crooks and hollers of the southern Missouri…
As unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous as its title, Luca Guadagnino’s visually ravishing third feature suggests an epic that Visconti and Sirk might have made after they finished watching Vertigo and reading Madame Bovary while gorging themselves on aphrodisiacs. That it works so well—despite frequently risible dialogue (“Happy is a word…
Opening with a close-up of the crow’s feet around its subject’s eyes and expanding to reveal her Botox-frozen upper lip, the documentary-portrait Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work celebrates Saint Joan the Resilient, Showbiz Survivor. Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg dogged the indomitable stand-up comic throughout the course of her…
Fifteen years after ushering in a new era of CGI animation, and 11 years after a colossally successful pre-millennial sequel, the Toy Story franchise returns to a changed world. Its irresistible conceit and snappy good humor remain largely intact, though now it also hauls a saltier and more anxious sensibility…
Like its predecessor, 2010’s Harald Zwart-directed The Karate Kid begins with an uprooting. Young Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) and his mother (Taraji P. Henson) are introduced in the Detroit apartment that he grew up in, now packed into boxes. Ralph Macchio shipped off to the Valley; Dre is going to…
Q’orianka Kilcher’s first role since her stunning breakout as Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s The New World finds her playing to type as the last princess of Hawaii, struggling against the American takeover of a then-sovereign republic. It’s her second indigenous-versus-white people role in a row, which suggests troubling things about…
Passionate Republican, fervent Orthodox Jew, ruthless wheeler-dealer and super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff at his height fashioned himself into a human ATM machine who lined the pockets of politicians on every side of the aisle. Sooner or later, everybody from Tom DeLay to Patrick Kennedy was at least marginally in his debt…
Inspired by a drug ring that used Hasidic Jews to transport over one million pills of ecstasy to the United States in a six-month period between 1998 and ’99, Kevin Asch’s Holy Rollers stars Jesse Eisenberg as a good old Brooklyn boy turned mid-level dope importer. Driven by the sense…
There are myriad moments during Get Him to the Greek—the roller-coaster spin-off of Forgetting Sarah Marshall—when it feels as if the thing will jump the rails and smash to the ground in a thousand pieces of what-in-the-fuck. It’s a complete and utter mess from the big-loud-dumb start to the awwww-that’s-so-sweet…
Though Sundance-screened and sporting an upscale cast, writer-director Vincenzo Natali’s Splice has a mad science quality. He has crossbred a self-serious psychodrama and a queasy creature-feature and unleashed this malformed freak on the world. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are Clive and Elsa, a married couple of “rock star” genetic…
Nicole Holofcener’s fourth feature, Please Give, is a notable rebound from the insufficiently examined self-absorption of her last, Friends With Money. Please Give is not quite Lovely & Amazing—Holofcener’s mordant, quasi-autobiographical “three sisters” spin—but it is, for the most part, witty and engrossing. Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt)…
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time’s story hinges on a dagger that can rewind time, a narrative conceit that doubles as a taunt to those who endure this cacophonous, frivolous adaptation of Ubisoft’s Arabian Nights-themed video-game series. Bruckheimered to the hilt with the same rollicking period-piece cheesiness that typified…
Say what you will, Michael Patrick King knows how to stage a fabulous gay nuptial. Sex and the City 2 begins with flair and good humor at the wedding of Stanford (Willie Garson) and Anthony (Mario Cantone), complete with a gay men’s chorus in white top-and-tails crooning a tastefully low-key…
CANNES, France—The jury has their awards, and I have mine. Sometimes they even coincide. Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s modest Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives—the acme of no-budget, Buddhist-animist, faux-naïve magic realism—towered over a shockingly mediocre competition. (Distant runners-up were Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy and South Korean…
CANNES, France—Midway through the 63rd Cannes Film Festival it’s clear that, although the competition oozes glamour and Wall Street never sleeps, the action this year (even more than in the past) is to be found in its less prestigious shadow, the section with the untranslatable moniker, “Un Certain Regard.” The…
In his work as writer-director, Rodrigo García has admirably distinguished himself through his commitment to creating intelligent, complex roles for his heavily distaff casts. Like his debut, Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000), and Nine Lives (2005), Mother and Child is a compassionate, multi-threaded tale about…
MacGruber (Will Forte), a highly decorated soldier of fortune known for “making life-saving inventions out of household materials,” faked his death and went into hiding after his fiancée (Maya Rudolph) was killed at their wedding, likely by MacGruber’s archenemy, wealthy industrialist Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer). Years later, when the…
Another movie, not as awful or deluded as this one, might one day find better use for the easygoing vibe between Queen Latifah and Common, the stars of Just Wright, a romantic comedy (for the ladies) with basketball and cameoing NBA players in it (for the fellas). That absolutely no…
Is it an accident that Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood plays like a rousing love letter to the Tea Party movement? It’s certainly something of a surprise. When the movie was announced in 2007 with the title Nottingham, reports suggested that it would sympathize with the normally vilified Sheriff of Nottingham…
The great boundary-crosser of Iranian cinema, Bahman Ghobadi, purposefully steps over the line with No One Knows About Persian Cats—a quasi-documentary, highly unofficial panorama of Tehran’s tenacious underground music scene and a movie that has accrued additional urgency since its first public screening at Cannes last May. Ghobadi’s co-writer, journalist…
As Iron Man 2 begins, Tony Stark—mechanical genius, Forbes 400 perennial, the pop-star CEO of Stark Industries—has dropped any pretense of a secret identity. Stark is garishly “out” as Iron Man, performing a one-man air show before touching down to host his Stark Expo, which transforms the World’s Fairground at…
I took the 6-year-old who lives in my house to the Sunday-afternoon sneak preview of Furry Vengeance. The boy’s a savvy consumer of kids’ popular culture—my greatest parenting triumph thus far. He knew from myriad Disney Channel commercials (the movie stars Matt Prokop of High School Musical 3) that Furry…
