In The Kid With a Bike, Cyril (Thomas Doret), a scrappy 11-year-old living in an urban orphanage, flees school in an attempt to track down both his deadbeat dad (Jérémie Renier) and the bike he left at his dad’s house. On the lam, Cyril carelessly crashes into Samantha (Cécile de…
In the first scene of Israel’s Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee, Footnote, Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi) — a 40-something Talmudic scholar whose research has earned adulation while his 60-something father’s has mostly been ignored — accepts an honor with an obliviously glib speech built around a childhood anecdote about his…
The gorgeously scruffy Juliette (director/cowriter Valérie Donzelli) and Roméo (cowriter Jérémie Elkaïm) — yes, the improbability is noted — move from dive-bar love-at-first-sight to proud parents of a newborn boy in the first few minutes of Declaration of War. Then their 18-month-old son, Adam, is diagnosed with a brain tumor…
In We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tilda Swinton lives out an urban bohemian’s worst nightmare. Forced to give up her independence (and downtown loft) when a reckless night with schlubby photographer flame Franklin (John C. Reilly) results in accidental pregnancy, free-spirit travel writer Eva becomes an unhappy housewife in…
There’s no question that the 2012 edition of the Sundance Film Festival was stuffed with films in some way touched by the psychological and practical fallout of economic crisis. It was blatant in documentaries such as Lauren Greenfield’s Queen of Versailles, in which a nouveau riche time-share mogul’s gaudy lifestyle…
In Carnage posh pair Alan and Nancy (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet) come to the home of wholesaler Michael (John C. Reilly) and crunchy author Penelope (Jodie Foster) to discuss how to deal with the fact that the former couple’s son hit the latter couple’s son in the face with…
In the first scene of The Iron Lady, 80-something Margaret Thatcher is presented as a little old lady unfit for the fast-moving world outside her hermetic London townhouse. The bulk of the movie takes place in an even smaller, more airless space: the dementia-stricken former British prime minister’s head. The…
1. Margaret Margaret, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me), starring Anna Paquin with key supporting performances from Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo, is a coming-of-age tale infused with post-9/11 anxiety. Margaret features Paquin — in the performance of the year — as Lisa, a Manhattan…
We know — you’re excited about The Dark Knight Rises. And The Avengers. And The Hunger Games. So are we. We’re also excited about a lot of other movies whose marketing campaigns have not inundated us with white noise (yet). Allow us to suggest a few more films to put…
Having barely escaped a bungled attempt to cross lines during the Spanish Civil War, Spanish man-of-mystery Juan Pujol offered his services as a spy to the British at the dawn of WWII and was rejected. He ended up working for the Allies only after fully infiltrating himself with the Germans,…
Martin Scorsese’s first foray into 3-D family filmmaking centers on its title character, played by Asa Butterfield, a just-prepubescent orphan squatting in a train station circa 1930. When not dodging an orphan-hunting station constable (Sacha Baron Cohen), Hugo secretly maintains the station’s clocks and attempts to fix an automaton, the…
In the TV-movie-quality impersonation that is Simon Curtis’ My Week With Marilyn, Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) has arrived in 1956 London to star in The Prince and the Showgirl, directed by and costarring Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh). The pill-addled peroxide blond sweeps onto Olivier’s set with an entourage and habitually…
The morality of the mad-scientist tale has remained more or less fixed since the beginning of sound cinema: From Dr. Frankenstein’s hubristic claim to “know what it feels like to be God” to Jurassic Park’s criticism of “scientists [who] were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop…
In hindsight, the 1984 hit Footloose — starring Kevin Bacon and directed by Herbert Ross — along with its contemporary Flashdance can be seen as the link between the old Hollywood model of a let’s-put-on-a-show musical, based on original songs brought to life in elaborate choreographed numbers, and the later…
Currently the fifth-to-last film on Steven Soderbergh’s ever-expanding preretirement slate, Contagion opens on day two of a global viral epidemic. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Beth Emhoff, an American employee for an ominously unspecific multinational corporation who returns from a business trip in Hong Kong to her wintry Midwestern home feeling like…
In Our Idiot Brother, Paul Rudd plays Ned, an upstate New York version of “The Dude” Lebowski who is “entrapped” into selling pot to a uniformed police officer and swiftly sent to jail. Post-prison, Ned discovers that his longterm girlfriend Janet (Kathryn Hahn) has taken up with a new dude,…
Directed by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig from a screenplay and novel by David Nicholls, One Day stars Anne Hathaway as Emma, a too-serious would-be writer in Coke-bottle glasses and combat boots. She’s nursing a crush on Dexter (Jim Sturgess), her too-good-looking rich-boy college classmate. She’s earnest, tenacious, and crippled by…
There may be nothing as Old Hollywood as the narrative about a pretty girl summoning up a dose of pluck to triumph over adversity. And yet Brit Marling — the lithe, stunning cowriter and star of 2011 Sundance Film Festival hits Another Earth and Sound of My Voice, who gives…
More than just the Hollywood “it” girl of the moment, Emma Stone is a real actress, and in The Help, she gets an ostentatious, Oscar-baiting big scene in which to prove it. Stone is, to borrow a phrase from Bret Easton Ellis’ Twitter account, thoroughly postempire — she doesn’t need…
Nina (Li Bingbing) is a Shanghai career girl who drops plans to move to New York when she learns her estranged bestie, Sophie (Gianna Jun), is in a coma. Soon Nina discovers the manuscript of a novel Sophie had been writing, which turns their long-term friendship (cemented as teens dancing…
A uniquely Freudian entry in the body-switching comedy canon, The Change-Up stars Jason Bateman as standard-issue anal-retentive lawyer/family man Dave and Ryan Reynolds as Dave’s classically anal-expulsive stoner/playboy childhood friend Mitch. When sober, Dave begrudgingly tolerates Mitch’s wild-animal routine. One night, when both are drunk, Dave admits he’s secretly jealous…
In the first scene of Crazy, Stupid, Love, Emily (Julianne Moore) tells Cal (Steve Carell), her high school sweetheart and husband of 20-plus years, that she wants a divorce. She goes on to mention that she had an affair with a coworker named Dave Lindhagen (Kevin Bacon), at which point…
