Apart from the stray slasher flick, Halloween is traditionally a dead spot on the Hollywood calendar. This week’s big release? The Michael Jackson tribute film This Is It—creepy in its own right. But Universal Studios has been raiding its catacombs for DVD reissues. Let’s brush the cobwebs aside. Conventional wisdom…
The title is a double entendre in An Education, the film version of British journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir about the crash course she received in the “university of life” while studying for her A-levels in early-1960s suburban London. So, too, is Danish director Lone Scherfig’s movie something of a deceptively…
Like the ominous fingernail moon early on in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, the bloodsucker trend is again in a waxing phase thanks to the mass cult followings of the Twilight saga and HBO’s True Blood. However, the only authentic vampires in this first (and, I can all but…
Billed as a “collective feature film,” New York, I Love You is the second in the “Cities of Love” series. As with its predecessor, Paris je t’aime, there are hits and misses. Producer Emmanuel Benbihy decreed that each of the 11 segments be set in a specific neighborhood, but only…
The movie wastes no time: Before the opening credits, a man watches two home invaders slaughter his wife and daughter—and we don’t even know their names. And then: Deals are cut, the murderer walks while his less culpable accomplice is sentenced to death, and the dad wonders, “But what about…
Founded by self-described urban guerrillas Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, the Red Army Faction were the Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army and righteous outlaws of Bonnie and Clyde combined—robbing banks, planting bombs, shooting cops and assassinating judges for the better part of the decade that followed the convulsions…
Directed by Spike Jonze from a 400-word children’s picture book first published in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are may be the toughest adaptation since Tim Burton fashioned Mars Attacks! from a series of bubblegum cards. Tougher, actually: Burton was working with ephemeral, anonymous trash; Jonze is elaborating on a…
In the Oscar derby for Best Actor, is it better to die or to grieve? Clive Owen opts for the latter route in this strained, sentimental adaptation of a memoir by widowed English journalist Simon Carr. His 2001 book—boozy, breezy and thoroughly unsystematic—was a precursor to the new laissez-faire parenting…
Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel gives us Belle Époque Coco, opening in 1893 with a grim scene of the 10-year-old waif and her sister unceremoniously dumped at an orphanage and ending around World War I, a few years before the Chanel empire is launched. Jan Kounen’s moldy Coco Chanel &…
In 1941, with financial woes mounting and an animators’ strike making his studio anything but the happiest place on earth, Walt Disney took President Franklin D. Roosevelt up on the offer to be a cultural ambassador to Latin America. For the United States, it was a chance to woo potential…
Ostensibly, Free Style is one of those uplifting family movies built around a niche sport à la 1993’s rollerblading cash-in Airborne, with an underdog realizing dreams against the odds. Veteran family fare hack William Dear (Harry and the Hendersons!) does a decent job of fetishizing motocross, with motorcycles splattering dirt all over…
The Invention of Lying’s plot hook sounds like a pile-up of Jim Carrey-Tom Shadyac concept comedies. The assumption is that there isn’t much crossover between the Liar, Liar and Ricky Gervais fanbases. Gervais’ fuzzy parable exists in an alternate universe where nobody has made a word for “truth” because nobody…
The ushers at a packed screening of Michael Moore’s latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, came proudly decked out in T-shirts bearing slogans like “Make Love, Not Capitalism” and “Capitalism, We Have a Problem.” The shirts and the movie are brought to you by those filthy Reds: Overture Films, which…
“Everything I write ends up being about loneliness,” said the late writer David Foster Wallace in a 1999 interview on the radio show Bookworm. In that conversation, Wallace was trying to get at the core of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, a four-part short story he wrote as a…
Amreeka The thriving subgenre of immigrant displacement dramedy gets a confident new spin from Cherien Dabis, a Palestinian-Jordanian raised in the United States. Divorced, demoralized and struggling with her weight, Palestinian bank employee Muna (a very good Nisreen Faour) leaves the occupied West Bank with her teenage son, Fadi (Melkar…
Paris Paris, as overdocumented as any great city, still has new facets to reflect. For proof, see Claire Denis’ idiosyncratically observed 35 Shots of Rum—a contrast to Cedric Klapisch’s Paris panorama, an encyclopedia of “types” and banal C’est la vie lessons. When an ensemble film works, you welcome the shifts…
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Tucker Max got famous through a Web site detailing how being an asshole to women constantly got him laid, making him a hero to frat boys and a demon to everyone else who noticed. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, adapted from…
The Other Man Whatever initial life there might have been in a story by German writer Bernhard Schlink (The Reader) has been crushed to a pulp by writer-director Richard Eyre (Notes on a Scandal) in this flat thriller about a software executive (Liam Neeson) hunting down the lover of his…
As evidenced by The Informant!, it’s a hell of a tricky thing turning real-life pulp into floss sugar. The story of Archer Daniels Midland biochemist-exec-turned-crooked-federal-snitch Mark Whitacre is a tragicomedy. Journalist Kurt Eichenwald spent five years trailing the bipolar fuck-up, and his 2000 book, The Informant, is so densely, richly…
Set in the bucolic suburbs of early 19th-century London, as fresh and dewy as a newly mowed lawn, Jane Campion’s Bright Star recounts the love affair between a tubercular young poet and the fashionable teenager next door. It’s more conventionally romantic than wildly Romantic—but no less touching for that. Fanny…
Early in Shane Acker’s computer-animated debut feature 9, a diminutive anthropomorphic whatsit with wooden hands, copper fingers and the titular numeral emblazoned on his chest awakens to the lifeless body of his human creator and sets forth into a decimated industrial landscape—all twisted metal and smokestacks—that calls to mind London…
When, in the early ’00s, I worked as a freelancer for a publication two floors below Vogue—this was pre-Devil Wears Prada—each sighting of Anna Wintour, no matter from how great a distance, was terrifying enough to immobilize me for a few seconds, leading to a sweaty paralysis when I found…
