A big-bang demolition derby, J.J. Abrams’ much-anticipated, greatly enjoyable Super 8 seems bound for box-office glory. Opening three weeks before July 4, this Steven Spielberg-produced, kidcentric, 21st-century disaster flick could well hang in at theaters till the tenth anniversary of 9/11 — an event that haunts Abrams’ surefire blockbuster nearly…
Danish artist Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity documents an anti-monument to negativity. Admirably forward-thinking if undeniably quixotic, Finland’s government has undertaken the task of digging a hole in which to bury nuclear waste deep in the Earth. Located 100 miles northwest of Helsinki, Onkalo (Finnish for “hiding place”) is intended to…
The eight gentle Trappist monks depicted in Of Gods and Men uphold the faith that brought them from France to Algeria, only to be abducted and massacred, presumably by fanatics of a rival religious persuasion. The movie, based on a 1996 event that continues to resonate in France, opens on…
Tenacious indie Kelly Reichardt has specialized in quirky, minimalist quasi-road movies in which loners come unmoored in some great American space. Meek’s Cutoff is that and more — one great leap into the 19th-century unknown. The members of a small wagon train crossing the Oregon Trail in 1845 follow their…
One of the few justifiable recent excursions into 3-D, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams documents a secret wonder of the world, the Chauvet cave — a subterranean gallery of 300 animal images discovered in 1994 in the South of France. Twice as old as the paintings at Lascaux yet…
Cheerfully diffident, garrulous yet un-inflected, blithely self-absorbed, the mumblecore brand proliferates: Last year’s star vehicles Greenberg and Cyrus introduced the concept of mega mumble. Likewise, Cold Weather stakes a claim as the founding work of mumble noir. Exhibiting no particular rush to draw the viewer into its world, Cold Weather…
The eight gentle Trappist monks depicted in Of Gods and Men uphold the faith that brought them from France to Algeria only to be abducted and massacred, presumably by fanatics of a rival religious persuasion. The movie, based on a 1996 event that continues to resonate in France, opens on…
As spacey as its title suggests, Gregg Araki’s latest youth film is an occult mystery set in the ultimate SoCal college playpen. Kaboom is Scooby Doo with sex, drugs, and tattooed hotties; following on the heels of Araki’s relatively commercial stoner farce Smiley Face (2007), the movie makes you wonder…
Lovingly animating an unproduced script by the great Jacques Tati, The Illusionist is, at least in part, a chaste father-daughter romance. Animator Sylvain Chomet was even given the source material by French filmmaker Tati’s daughter. Chomet sets The Illusionist on the cusp of the ’60s. The animator presents his title…
There are few narratives more compelling than a survival story like director Peter Weir’s new adventure yarn. The protagonists of The Way Back are a group of Soviet prisoners who escape the Gulag during World War II, trekking 4,000 miles from Siberia to Outer Mongolia, across the Gobi Desert, over…
Only inertia will bring people to Michel Gondry’s 3-D spectacle, The Green Hornet. Opening amid persistent negative buzz in the mid-January dead zone, this long-germinating prospective franchise, based on a character that first saturated the nation’s radio waves in 1939, seems pretty much DOA — although in the absence of…
The late George Hickenlooper’s Casino Jack is an improbably blithe cautionary tale, recounting the rise and fall of D.C. superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. “You’re either a big-leaguer or you’re a slave clawing your way onto the C train,” the avid antihero (Kevin Spacey) tells his mirrored reflection in the pre-credit sequence;…
White Material is a portrait of change and a thing of terrible beauty. The time is unspecified. The subject is the collapse of an unnamed West African state, and the protagonist, Maria, a French settler unflinchingly played by Isabelle Huppert, is the proprietress of a family-run coffee plantation. White Material…
The Coen brothers’ True Grit is well-wrought, if overly talkative, and seriously ambitious. Opening with a strategically abbreviated Old Testament proverb (“The wicked flee when none pursueth”), the film returns the Coens to the all-American sagebrush and gun-smoke landscape that has best nourished their wise-guy sensibility. This perverse buddy tale,…
A picnic for Anglophiles, not to mention a prospective Oscar bonanza, The King’s Speech is a well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor. The story is a good one: shy, young prince helped by irascible wizard to break an…
Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture is a comedy of youthful confusion that gets its kick not only for evoking a world of unromantic hookups, casual BJs, and iPhone porn, but for satirizing New York’s bourgeois bohemia. Newly graduated from an artsy Midwestern college, Aura arrives at mother Siri’s immaculate white-on-white Tribeca…
The Fighter is based on the true story of light-welterweight champ “Irish” Micky Ward from Lowell, Massachusetts. But starring Boston working-class hero Mark Wahlberg, it plays as a Rocky-fied fairy tale for our time: Consigned to Palookaville, a sweet, unassuming boxer with more heart than brains steps up — all…
Jeff Bridges is God and, as digitally captured from the original 1982 Tron, he’s also the devil in the megamillion-dollar reboot Tron: Legacy. The notion of a tragically split persona might have been scripted to give the new movie a measure of emotional gravitas, but why bother with writing when…
A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp — at the very least, it’s the most risible and riotous backstage movie since Showgirls. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake has had a spooky quality at least since Tod Browning appropriated a few bars of…
Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan’s prize-winning documentary is an intimate portrait of an unfathomable immensity, focusing on a single family caught up in the world’s largest mass migration. Opening overhead shots show a huge mob waiting in the rain to push their way into China’s Guangzhou railroad station for the annual…
Is America’s last cowboy icon prospecting for more Oscar gold? Taking for his map an original screenplay by British docu-dramatist Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon), Clint Eastwood rides a sleepy burro deep into Iñárritu territory. Multiple story lines cross international borders to mix personal tragedy with post-9/11 existential terror. Hereafter…
As suggested by its title, Allen Ginsberg’s game-changing poem Howl is essentially performative — and so is Howl, the Sundance-opening quasibiographical movie by Oscar-winning documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Howl the movie — which, in addition to touching on Ginsberg’s early life (and successful coming out), dramatizes the poem’s…
