Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have transformed some of the saggiest, most clichéd genres with smarts, non-screechy politics, superb acting and visual beauty. Though, on paper, its premise could have easily elicited groans, Half Nelson—their 2006 feature debut (that Fleck directed and the two co-wrote) about a white middle-class Brooklyn…
Kevin Macdonald’s Washington thriller is a bellows designed to puff up the most beaten-down reporter’s chest. Compressed from the highly regarded BBC miniseries first telecast in 2003, State of Play is an effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer. There are more than a few…
This much is for sure about the makers of the new Zac Efron picture 17 Again: They know their audience. Scientifically engineered for maximum shriek-and-squeal value among Efron’s legion of distaff tween fans (and no small number of lonelyheart cougars and gay men), the movie opens on His Zackness’ sweaty,…
Observe and Report writer-director Jody Hill makes mean-spirited tragedies that studios market as inane comedies because otherwise no one would pay a cent to see them. That’s more or less what happened to Hill’s The Foot Fist Way in 2008. Three viewings later, it’s more unclear than ever whether Danny…
Pundits agree: The 2008 election has finally and forever rung down the curtain on America’s longest-running psychodrama, namely the Boomerography, aka the ’60s. The long, strange trip is finally over. Still, a few stories remain to be told or retold. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 marks a particular 40th anniversary—not Richard…
Set a mere two decades ago, Greg Mottola’s Adventureland seems as if it could be taking place on a distant planet, less for the leg warmers and knee socks clinging to lower extremities than for the legions of pre-Internet Luddites who gather, like the apes at the start of 2001,…
With the molded-rubber face of Savalas, the basso profundo of Stallone and the name of an underdog gas alternative, Vin Diesel’s already-dubious ripped-tough-guy star has dimmed enough to warrant a return to the car-chase series that made him—and money. In the latest, notably slack Fast & Furious (number four), incidental…
At the end of 2008, DreamWorks Animation bossman Jeffrey Katzenberg embarked on a cross-country tour, toting 20 minutes’ worth of Monsters vs. Aliens. The reason for his trek? To convince critics that 3-D movies are no longer the snake-oil salesman’s hustle, but the future of filmmaking—if not the very savior…
If I were to spend this space mentioning every AFI Dallas International Film Festival title worth at least a look, there’d be room enough only for a queue of names. So plentiful are this year’s recommended offerings—a majority of the 70-plus features, not to mention even more shorts—that it’s tempting…
Just as we thought the “bromantic comedy” had overstayed its welcome, the genre reaches its high point with I Love You, Man. The subtext is finally the text—it’s right there in the title. The movie delivers an absolutely complete, fully realized, delightfully novel redo of the hoariest of forms: the…
Whether it’s the amnesiac super spy of the Bourne franchise or the weary law-firm fixer of Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy specializes in characters who wear so many masks that, memory loss or no, they scarcely know who they are anymore. Guided by instinct, his soldiers of fortune patrol a ruthless…
“That was the most offensive display of sexualized violence I have ever seen,” one wilting fellow in need of a camphor hankie was overheard saying in the elevator. Such blanching is the reaction Last House on the Left is trolling for, but I doubt it will be typical. Permissibility has…
The most eagerly anticipated (as well as the most beleaguered) movie of the year (if not the century), Watchmen is neither desecratory disaster nor total triumph. In filming David Hayter and Alex Tse’s adaptation of the most ambitious superhero comic book ever written, director Zack Snyder has managed to address…
Martin Scorsese may be presenting Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, but this corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like Mean Streets cubed. Detailing daily life inside a criminal state, it’s a new sort of gangster film for America to ponder. Gomorrah takes its punning…
Haven’t we been here before? The inbred mutant offspring of Crash and Babel, writer-director Wayne Kramer’s Crossing Over treats the subject of illegal immigrants coming to (and from) Los Angeles with the same vulgarity that Kramer brought to his 2006 children-in-peril thriller Running Scared, this time (barely) concealed under a…
If Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a lovelorn bachelor in James Gray’s Two Lovers, were 12 years old, the movie might make a touching, if not noticeably fresh, romantic drama for tweens. Not that adults don’t nurse unhealthy crushes and regress madly under the pressure of hopeless infatuation, which may be…
Compare and contrast Laurent Cantet’s terrific The Class with any of the following schoolroom chestnuts—Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dangerous Minds or To Sir, With Love. Note the structural similarities: misbehaving students, an educator who wants them to succeed and big thoughts about the classroom as urban microcosm. Discuss the difference between…
Modest but cosmic, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy is a movie whose sad pixie heroine, Wendy (Michelle Williams), already skating on thin ice, stumbles and, without a single support to brace herself, slides into America’s lower depths. Introduced calling for her dog, Lucy, Wendy loses first her liberty (briefly), then…
Tom Tykwer’s The International is one of those movies in which shadowy men meet in parked cars, abandoned buildings and inconspicuous public spaces, travel under assumed names and always glance nervously over their shoulders, fearful of being spied on through a sniper’s lens. All tread carefully around potentially bugged telephones,…
The Confessions of a Shopaholic we need right now would be a handheld doc featuring former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain sobbing into the camera and begging the American public to forgive him for purchasing a $35,000 commode. With its curious release date—the film is meant to be Valentine’s Day…
Coraline If Alice in Wonderland were retold by the Mad Hatter, it might look something like Henry Selick’s 3-D, stop-motion Coraline, in which the bored, blue-haired 11-year-old of the title (voiced by Dakota Fanning) travels through the looking glass and ends up in a world that strangely resembles her own—except…
The smirky, overbearing and subliminally hostile romantic primer He’s Just Not That Into You—which sold a regrettable 2 million copies when it was published in 2004—seizes on some partial truths about the gender wars and blows them up into evolutionary gospel, as follows: Since cave-dwelling times, men have been programmed…
