Since it’s called Austenland, and since it’s a romantic comedy, you probably expect it to open with “It’s a truth universally acknowledged” and to wrap with one lovesick sap madly dashing after another, right up to an airport’s departure gates, even though both presumably have cell phones and could just…
Despite the giddy, gory ridiculousness of Kick-Ass 2, this summer’s most violent yet least punishing comic-book movie, there’s a kernel of ugly human truth at the core of the Kick-Ass fantasy. In the first issue of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass comic, from 2008, a lonely high school…
Besides its dozen or so big laughs and its winning streak of middle-upper-crust romantic jadedness, Dan Mazer’s I Give It a Year has going for it a trait you might have thought had been bred out of audience-pleasing romantic comedies by now: suspense about with whom its leads will find…
How would those Bronze Age storytellers who shaped and handed down the myths of Ancient Greece fare in a modern screenwriting seminar? All that elusive, improvisatory strangeness, that alien sense of causality, that emphasis on origins, not just of franchisable characters but of everything in the natural world, right down…
Here’s something you would think we could all agree on: Rigid parts of the body probably shouldn’t go slack. But try asking a SeaWorld spokesperson about the drooping dorsal fins on so many of the park chain’s performing male orca, about that mighty spike that in the wild juts above…
“I kept thinking she was the ugly duckling who was going to turn into a swan,” a fortyish loudmouth complained as the crowd trudged out of a preview screening of The To Do List. “But she was an ugly duckling all the way through!” He was talking to two women…
Like first sex, writer/director Maggie Carey’s debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise but not quite adept at getting everyone off. It’s an impossibly huge deal yet also a modest achievement, something we have to go through but will no doubt be…
Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-in-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…
With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer-director Sebastián Silva’s altered-states/group-dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy—weaknesses you’ll likely recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is the pushy, wheedling neediness of…
One of the most beguiling of the many stories all knotted up in Salman Rushdie’s brilliant, baggy, exhausting 1981 novel Midnight’s Children concerns a lovelorn doctor, his beautiful patient, and that timeless exemplar of old-world prudishness: a sheet with a hole in it. The patient, Naseem, not yet of marriageable…
Since it opens with a suicide bombing in downtown Tel Aviv and since its mystery plot involves a sheik whose public expectorations call for the slaughter of Israeli civilians, The Attack is most avowedly “about” terrorism. But that isn’t its subject. The film is about love, trauma, and trust, both…
Surprising proof that Hollywood still can craft a memorable studio comedy, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down stands as a singular achievement in parody, its auteur’s intentions be damned. It’s not only a pitch-perfect attack on every risible plot point afflicting today’s all-exposition-and-explosions filmmaking but also a mad liberal’s vision of…
Terrorizing children in their bedrooms remains the existential concern of the toothy blobs, hams, and pop-pom-furred Wild Things that populate Monsters movies. Their very lives depend upon coaxing night-screams from human kids, a premise rich enough for Seuss or Borges. Is it too much to ask, then, that a film…
“A great singer, chandeliers, champagne, and costumes — we see this at a distance,” Jean-François Sivadier says deep into Becoming Traviata, a spare and ravishing documentary that positions viewers in the rehearsal room in the weeks leading up to his minimalist production of Verdi’s La Traviata. Sivadier is encouraging his…
Here’s a category idea for bar trivia: Collect one-sentence plot summaries of young-adult novel series and R-rated horror films, and see who can distinguish which from which. The one in which the kids kill each other for sport is approved by school districts for extra-credit reading, as is the one…
“Least you got to see a motherfucker crucify himself,” Richard Pryor spits in the most surprising footage director Marina Zenovich has unearthed for her new documentary Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic. The scene is of Pryor’s last great cock-up just before his last, great comeback. Pacing restlessly before a Hollywood…
There’s one key truth that separates the tank-topped gearheads of the Fast & Furious movies from the rest of us. Every problem these lugnuts face can be solved by doing the one thing these lugnuts love most: driving really fast. It’s like if you could deal with your taxes by…
Has anyone ever been so perfectly cast as Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused? Sculpted entirely of charisma and cheekbones yet still seedier than a stash of gym-locker pot, McConaughey’s radiant stoner exemplified high school promise gone bad. he looked like the little man of top of trophies, just horny,…
At any prior point in TV history, Rectify, a six-part drama on the Sundance channel, would be a shake-up-the-medium astonishment: A sober, even stately investigation into a curious kind of afterlife, that of a death-row inmate given freedom twenty years after his conviction. For all the finely crafted mysteries of…
Half a year later, now on Blu-ray and DVD, Django Unchained is still kicking up shit, this time via cross-media trickle-down. TV’s LL Cool J, not long before declaring Confederate flag apparel A-OK with him, dared to express in “Accidental Racist” one hard-edged complaint about the life of a black…
Leonie Squanders an Ambitious Lead Performance by the Stellar Emily Mortimer
Tom Cruise’s Oblivion Is Grand Until It’s Not
