The Red Army Faction robbed banks, planted bombs, shot cops, and assassinated judges for the better part of the decade that followed the convulsions of 1968. Directed from Bernd Eichinger’s screenplay by Uli Edel, The Baader Meinhof Complex is a sweeping, hectic docudrama. Despite a large cast, the film focuses…
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…
Step two in Francis Ford Coppola’s reinvention as a self-financed, off-Hollywood, personal filmmaker, Tetro — a moody job shot in carefully-framed widescreen and sumptuous, black-and-white chiaroscuro — is a marked advance over the Faustian, time-traveling absurdity Youth Without Youth (2007). Bennie Tetrocini (Alden Ehrenreich), an 18-year-old waiter on a luxury…
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 a series of bubblegum cards into Mars Attacks! Tougher, actually: Burton was working with ephemeral, anonymous trash; Jonze is elaborating on a…
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…
Humpday opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (mumblecordeon Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess that they’re too tired to procreate that night. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2 a.m., and Ben’s long-lost college buddy, Andrew (Blair Witch Project survivor…
Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain’s alarming Tony Manero is named not for its protagonist but rather his ego-ideal, John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever. The film, set in the dark days of the Pinochet regime, is a study of a solitary daydreamer in which an unsmiling 50-ish madman nurtures fanatical…
Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment — rich in fantasy and blithely amoral. It’s also quintessential Tarantino — even more drenched in film references than gore. Tepidly received in Cannes and thereafter tweaked, Inglourious Basterds may still be a tad long at two…
Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (mumblecordeon Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess that they’re too tired to procreate that night and then confess their mutual relief. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2…
Moon, directed by British advert tyro Duncan Jones, is a modest science-fiction film with major aspirations. Jones’ debut is pleased to engage genre behemoths — 2001, Solaris, Blade Runner— as well as B-movie classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The tale of a lonely spaceman might have made an…
It’s said that heterosexuals can’t understand camp because everything they do is camp. Such, more or less, is the method of the new Sacha Baron Cohen extravaganza, Brüno. Directed by guerrilla filmmaker Larry Charles, Brüno is often hilarious. Is it a minstrel show? Co-opting gay culture? Evidence of new tolerance?…
Character is destiny — at least for Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. Allen’s exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia opens with a snatch of Groucho Marx singing his trademark paradoxical assertion (“Hello, I must be going”) and is powered almost entirely by the presence of a single, larger-than-life, and less-than-likable figure. Whatever…
Earth Abig-screen, family-friendly (well… friendlier) version of the enthralling BBC/Discovery series Planet Earth, Earth follows three animal families — polar bears scavenging for food in the High Arctic, elephants trekking across the Kalahari Desert in search of water, a humpback whale and her young calf on their annual 4,000-mile migration…
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…
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…
I hear America singing, and I see… Richard Nixon. Not the man but the muse: Has any president since Lincoln inspired more movies, TV miniseries, and operas? As Nixon’s beetle brows, ski nose, and mirthless grin were made for caricature, so his rampant pathology was a gift for novelists and…
Gus Van Sant has never been what you’d call a risk-averse filmmaker, but he directs his Harvey Milk biopic so carefully, there might be a Ming vase balanced on his head. Van Sant’s steps are deliberate, his posture is straight, his attitude is responsible, and his eyes are fixed firmly…
The protaganist of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a modestly gaudy people’s heroine industriously repairing the social world one frayed interaction at a time. After extended cameos in two previous Leigh films (as a resourceful pop tart in All or Nothing and a date-raped rich girl in Vera Drake), fine-boned Sally…
Oliver Stone’s W. may be less frenzied than his typical sensory bombardment. But in revisiting the early ’00s by way of the late ’60s, this psycho-historical portrait of George W. Bush has all the queasy appeal of a strychnine-laced acid flashback. Hideous re-creations of the shock-and-awful recent past merge with…
Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on flippancy. Given their refusal to take anything seriously — least of all the enthusiasm of their fans — the brothers surely got a chuckle from an upcoming academic tome, The Philosophy of the Coen…
As old Broadway shows are revived, new Broadway shows get spun from old movies so that new movies may be fashioned from ancient TV series. It’s an iron law of the culture industry that turns out to be a pleasant surprise in the case of Get Smart, the late-’60s sitcom…
CANNES, France—No need for dreaming here. Each Cannes Film Festival generates its own metaphors for a 10-day regimen of visions in the dark. It’s impossible to forget, let alone transcend, one’s unnatural situation here. The opening film of Cannes’s 2008 edition clobbered participants with a cautionary allegory. Regardez: The civilized…
