Published five years ago, Kazuo Ishiguro’s massively praised Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate universe where life has been extended and catastrophic illness eliminated thanks to an evolutionary advance, namely the harvesting of vital organs from specially bred human clones. But that’s backstory. Despite its lurid premise,…
Elegant opening credits, written like calligraphy on a wedding invitation, yield to a couple in blunt close-up—unhappy, interracial, tearfully celebrating their anniversary in a shopping-mall restaurant. After an unfathomable exchange, he presents her with an antique bowl found on eBay and, after reciting a guffaw-worthy litany of sins, promises to…
Directing himself as a verifiable big-movie lead after some time in supporting-actor Triple-A ball, director/star Ben Affleck models a full line of warm-up suits to play Doug MacRay, a second-generation blue-collar stickup man, brains of his four-man bank crew. The setting is Charlestown, the square-mile majority-Irish Boston neighborhood that shares…
I’m Still Here—”that Joaquin Phoenix movie”—capitalizes on an anxiety that’s very of-the-moment, uniting pop cultural phenomena as seemingly disparate as the too-stupid/good-to-be-true Jersey Shore characters, James Franco’s baffling side careers as a professional student and soap opera stud and pretty much every thing having to do with Vincent Gallo. Basically,…
Lebanon, written and directed by Samuel Maoz, is not just the year’s most impressive first feature but also the strongest new movie of any kind I’ve seen in 2010. Actually, Lebanon—which won the Golden Lion at Venice, after being rejected by Berlin and Cannes—hardly seems like a debut, perhaps because…
Sometimes you feel bad for movie marketers, tasked with connecting any given film to an audience as large as possible. Take, for example, The American. Judging by the film’s trailers and advertisements, it’s a fast-paced Euro-stylish thriller starring George Clooney as a dashing, conflicted hero. Yet it quickly becomes apparent…
Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals safety who enlisted in the Army Rangers eight months after September 11, read Emerson, Chomsky and, though an atheist, the Bible. Resembling a beefier Seann William Scott, he shunned cell phones, cars and professional-athlete megalomania. A fiercely private (and principled) person, his death in Afghanistan…
In 1993, inspired by his second cousin Danny Trejo’s work in Desperado, Robert Rodriguez wrote a screenplay around the character of Machete—a stringy-haired, leather-faced, ex-Federale turned down-and-dirty hitman turned violent crusader on behalf of his fellow illegal immigrants. While Trejo played a different character named Machete in Rodriguez’s Spy Kids…
With a small, well-chosen cast, sly script, and slippery, ambivalent characters, The Last Exorcism gives a welcome twist to the demonic-possession movie revival. A fourth-generation minister, Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) of Baton Rouge’s Church of St. Mark was groomed for the pulpit. Onetime child preacher Cotton has grown out of…
The two-part tale of French gangster-showman Jacques Mesrine is as densely packed and serially rambling as a well-trafficked Wikipedia entry. Director Jean-François Richet, who whipped up not-bad mayhem in his Assault on Precinct 13 remake, devotes so much time to tallying his subject’s career milestones and highlights that any insight…
The Switch is a loose adaptation of a Jeffrey Eugenides story called “Baster,” published in The New Yorker in 1996 and deemed fit for inclusion in the 2001 best-of anthology Wonderful Town. Last week, when asked by the New Yorker’s book blog about the film—which stars Jennifer Aniston and Jason…
Midway through Lottery Ticket, a teen-comedy-cum-wish-fulfillment fantasy, the movie’s hero, Kevin Carson, goes on a spending spree. The holder of a $370 million lottery ticket that he can’t cash in until after the July 4 holiday, Kevin accepts a $100,000 loan from a local gangster and proceeds to spend it…
“If the money’s right, we don’t care where the job is.” So explains the leader of hired-gun task force The Expendables, Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone). This credo lands Ross and his team in the Gulf of Aden as our story begins. Somali pirate kidnappers staging a videotaped decapitation are pinned…
Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is every bit as faithful to its source material (Bryan Lee O’Malley’s six-volume series about a 22-year-old go-nowhere man-boy fending off his new girlfriend’s seven evil exes) as Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was to his (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ brooding comic-hero deconstruction). Both…
After obligatory helicopter views of New York’s skyline open Adam McKay’s The Other Guys, we’re introduced to Danson and Highsmith (Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson), a duo of headline-grabbing, unflappable supercops who keep the city exciting, if not safe, with law enforcement by the Michael Bay book. The Other…
If the plot of Middle Men sounds familiar—Luke Wilson gets in bed with James Caan, who just wants to fuck him—that’s because it’s the same as the plot of Bottle Rocket, Wes Anderson’s 1996 directorial debut, in which Wilson and Caan worked together for the first time. Middle Men is…
Strictly speaking, the two scrappy Irish kids in Lance Daly’s Kisses aren’t homeless, but in every sense that matters, they have only each other for shelter. Kylie and Dylan (played by Kelly O’Neill and Shane Curry, both plucked from Dublin schools and oozing forlorn defiance) live next door to each…
In Steve Carell’s first few episodes of the American version of The Office, his character, Michael Scott, hewed closely to the template created by the series’ British mastermind, Ricky Gervais. Scott, like David Brent before him, was cruel and obtuse, a nightmare of a boss who thinks he’s a leader…
Salt, famously the Spy Flick Rewritten for Angelina Jolie After Tom Cruise Dropped Out, has been publicized as the cinematic equivalent of the 19th Amendment: finally, a level playing field for female action stars! This is mostly bullshit, of course—Jolie’s Evelyn Salt is not the first action hero to be…
Agora: Not lacking for conviction or cojones, Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora is a big, broad, stridently atheistic sword-and-sandals entertainment that recounts a tragic turning point in world history. Rachel Weisz plays Hypatia, a brilliant astronomer in 4th-century Alexandria whose life and work is increasingly threatened by a bloody societal shift toward…
The Nature of Existence: We’d all like to get to the bottom of the titular conundrum posed by Roger Nygard’s The Nature of Existence, but traveling around the world asking religious leaders, skeptics, scientists and a few ringer celebrities “life’s big questions” is probably not the best way to pursue…
Ramona and Beezus: Despite the presence of Mouse House starlet Selena Gomez, Ramona and Beezus is less Disney than Hallmark Channel, a loose adaptation of Beverly Cleary’s first novel in her beloved kid-lit series that’s wholesome to the point of dull. Elizabeth Allen’s innocuous film charts Ramona Quimby (Joey King)…
