Does Nancy Meyers hate women? The thought ran through my head not very long into It’s Complicated, Meyers’ biennial stocking-stuffer about the romantic trials and tribulations of obscenely privileged and narcissistic Southern Californians. Once more into the breach goes Meyers to show us what women really want, this time with…
Yesterday’s honky-tonk hero, Bad Blake, arrives at a Clovis, New Mexico, bowling alley. It’s another in a string of low-pay, low-turnout gigs with pickup bands half his age, grinding the greatest hits out of an old Fender Tremolux, including his breakout—with the chorus, “Funny how falling feels like flying…for a…
There’s no city-clogging traffic jam in Nine, the musicalized version of Federico Fellini’s movie-about-moviemaking urtext 8 1/2, but the result feels like the celluloid equivalent of a 12-car pileup. An assault on the senses from every conceivable direction—smash zooms, the ear-splitting eruption of something like music, the spectacle of a…
The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron’s mega-3-D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and like the Hope Diamond waved in front of your nose, the bling is almost blinding. For the first 45 minutes, I’m thinking: Metropolis!—and wondering how to amend ballots already cast in polls of the year’s…
Let’s be honest here: This is little more than meringue-whipped empty calories served alongside the real meat and potatoes at this most award-whoring time of the year at the cineplex. Which is fine. Better than fine, frankly, as Hugh Grant yet again proves he’s the most reliable deadpan smart-ass this…
Man, British heritage cinema can be dull and boring when assembly-lined for the export market. Laboring under lampshade millinery, hair that looks like cake, and more sumptuous banqueting than we should ever have to sit through, Emily Blunt is cute, sassy and wildly improbable as the titular Majesty-in-waiting, who, in…
Six decades after unleashing persistent NAACP bugaboo Song of the South (1946), and two after firmly suppressing it, that peculiar cultural institution known as the Walt Disney Co. has made a symbolic reparation by creating its first black princess—and plunking her down in the middle of Jim Crow-era Louisiana! A…
Aside from Morgan Freeman, who makes a fabulous Nelson Mandela, there’s this to savor about Invictus, a rosy tale of racial reconciliation neatly wrapped in a triumphalist sports movie: The film is blessedly free of Obama parallels. Also, we could use a happy global moment, and Eastwood picks one out…
The most significant American artist before Andy Warhol to take “the media” as his medium, Orson Welles lives on not only in posthumously restored director’s cuts of his re-released movies but as a character in other people’s novels, plays and movies—notably Richard Linklater’s deft, affectionate and unexpectedly enjoyable Me and…
There is something oddly familiar about Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, in which George Clooney plays a commitment-phobic business traveler with no use for meaningful human interaction. Could have sworn we’ve been here before. When was it? Oh, yes, of course: Joel and Ethan Coen’s Intolerable Cruelty, released in…
The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem—in which a father and his 10-year-old son traverse a despoiled landscape of unspeakable horror—was a quick, lacerating read. John Hillcoat’s literal adaptation, which arrives one Thanksgiving past its original release date is, by contrast, a long, dull slog. Fidelity to…
Given his preference for static, symmetrical, scrupulously color-coordinated and art-directed compositions, it’s less surprising that Wes Anderson has gotten around to directing an animated feature than that it took him this long to do it. Likewise, if Anderson—a nostalgia merchant whose ostensibly contemporary films always seem to be unfolding in…
Lars von Trier’s doggedly outrageous, fearsomely ambitious two-hander is so desperate to make you feel something—if only a terrible sensation of nothingness—that it’s almost poignant. Most simply put, Antichrist revels in the gruesome ordeal of a bereaved couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who lose their toddler because they were…
Bella: I’m coming. Edward: I don’t want you to. —The Twilight Saga: New Moon Worry not for the purity of your tween girls, global mothers. Where Catherine Hardwicke’s lively, irreverent take on the first book in the Twilight series at least made room for a few suggestive winks, the sequel…
Another poor, massive, uneducated black teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, The Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile and ever-grateful to…
Seven months after its theatrical release in the U.K., and two months after its DVD debut there, Pirate Radio washes ashore in U.S. theaters with a different title (it was formerly known as The Boat That Rocked) and most of its better bits excised. Writer-director Richard Curtis, paying homage to…
Completing his multi-film vendetta against the world’s tourist trade, German-born director Roland Emmerich sends the mother of all storms to level the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower and a priest-filled Vatican City, among other locales, in his newest end-times thriller, 2012. From Independence Day (1996) to The Day After Tomorrow…
In her broad outlines, Claireece Precious Jones risks sounding like the epitome of ghetto cliché: an obese, illiterate 16-year-old; mother to a 4-year-old Down syndrome daughter and now pregnant again; physically and psychologically abused by her mother; repeatedly raped by her father, who is also the father of her own…
The secret is out. Warner Bros. waited to unwrap The Box until two days before its opening because, compared to its madcap predecessors—the psychotic Holden Caulfield update Donnie Darko and the delirious welcome-to-the-21st-century extravaganza Southland Tales—the new Richard Kelly movie is basically a sock of coal for Christmas. A mysterious…
It’s not hard to see how the director of Forrest Gump would be thought a good fit to adapt the dearly beloved Dickens tale that has survived nearly two centuries of retelling. Stuffed with simple souls winning over a stingy misanthrope to the view that life is a box of…
Historical cataclysm produces conspiratorial thinking: Germany’s loss in World War I, the JFK assassination and 9/11 are all naturally understood as the stuff of unimaginable plots, unspeakable cover-ups and unseen forces. The guys who made The Men Who Stare at Goats can’t quite decide whether this syndrome is risible or…
Less documentary than closely and manipulatively edited homage to the new-agey “genius” of frequent Michael Jackson collaborator and High School Musical auteur Kenny Ortega, This Is It is about as honest as the song it’s named after—which was co-written with and then stolen from Paul Anka in 1983, sold to…
