Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics in 1941, Captain America was among the first American comic books intended as an explicit work of patriotic, political propaganda: The cover of the first edition, available months before Pearl Harbor, famously featured the titular costume hero punching out Adolf…
There’s a scene in Horrible Bosses in which Jennifer Aniston, playing a dentist who habitually sexually harasses her weakling male hygienist (Charlie Day), repeatedly says the word pussy. Her character is trying to intimidate his, while the filmmakers attempt to shock the audience with the spectacle of this lady rom-com…
For a movie called Larry Crowne, it sure is tough to get a solid read on the character of Larry Crowne. As the film opens, Larry seems content with his lot in life — before being fired for lacking a college education from his job at U-Mart, a big-box store…
From Tad Friend’s New Yorker profile of Anna Faris (which Jezebel.com reblogged under the headline “Hollywood Insiders Admit Hollywood Hates Women”) to the glass-ceiling-shattering pressure assigned to last month’s Bridesmaids (which has thus far outgrossed every previous Judd Apatow project since Knocked Up), a case could be made that 2011…
L’amour Fou opens with unbroken footage from designer Yves Saint-Laurent’s 2002 speech announcing his retirement from fashion, after 40-plus years at the helm of the massively important label bearing his name. It’s a stunning performance, flowing from naked confessional (“I have known the false friends of tranquilizers… and emerged dazzled…
A nebbishy screenwriter who longs to publish a novel, Gil (Owen Wilson) is tentatively working on a book set in a nostalgia shop — much to the open frustration of Inez (Rachel McAdams), his all-too-modern, rich-girl fiancée, who has a tendency to talk about him in catty, judgy tones as…
Built around the talents of cowriter/lead actress Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids is the first female-fronted comedy produced by Hollywood kingpin Judd Apatow, who has weathered criticism in the past for his brand’s dudecentric point of view. Bridesmaids’ core relationship is between Annie (Wiig) and her best friend of 30-plus years, Lillian…
The fifth installment in The Fast and the Furious franchise picks up where the fourth left off: Lunkhead street racer/noble criminal antihero Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) is in a bus en route to prison; his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) and her paramour/sometimes FBI agent Brian (Paul Walker) are en route…
When a local crime boss (Kevin Bacon) lures away his wife (Liv Tyler), lifelong pushover Frank (Rainn Wilson) — under the influence of a bizarre Christian kids’ TV show and a sci-fi-style encounter with something like God — starts to make himself over into a real-life superhero. On discovering that…
Paul Giamatti continues contemporary cinema’s longest pre-midlife crisis in Win Win as Mike, yet another schlubby 40-something flummoxed by mundane personal problems. Mike is the coach of the county’s worst high school wrestling team, and his failing small-town law practice has accrued a mountain of debt, which he’s too chicken-shit…
In this rethink of the 1981 screwball throwback, the titular drunken heir, originally played by lovable lump Dudley Moore, has been rebuilt to suit slinky British sleaze-comedian Russell Brand, whose constant nattering rarely transcends throat-clearing improv. Still supposedly a debauchee, Brand’s Arthur cruises Manhattan in too-tight schoolboy suits and fawns…
Heartbeats, the second feature from 21-year-old wünderkind Xavier Dolan, is an Instagram of the way we fuck now — or, more precisely, the way gorgeously costumed and coifed French-Canadian early-20-somethings fuck and/or fail to fuck while tripping over their own misguided attempts to land in love. The film bounces between…
As Suzanne, Catherine Deneuve plays the title role in Potiche, a 1970s period piece that translates as “trophy wife.” She is married to the smarmy, unfaithful Robert (Fabrice Luchini), whose primary attraction to Suzanne appears to have been motivated by the umbrella factory she inherited from her father, which Robert…
Director Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre) fragments Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel, introducing us to Jane (Mia Wasikowska) as a young woman run ragged, fleeing an unspecified threat. Setting up Jane’s tale as a mystery — what was she running from, and why? — Fukunaga skips back and forth across years to…
In a wintry woodland in an unspecified time long, long ago, teen beauty Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) is arranged to marry brooding, hunky, rich dude Henry (Max Irons), but is plotting to run away with brooding, hunky peasant Peter (Shiloh Fernandez). Then — bummer! — Valerie’s sister is eaten by the…
In The Adjustment Bureau, Matt Damon plays David Norris, a Brooklyn-born, bar-fight-prone congressman rocketing to the front of a Senate race apparently on the strength of his charisma and the idealism of his young supporters: “Come November, I want [the naysayers] to know it was young people like you who…
Mike Leigh’s Another Year concerns a year in the life of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), the happiest post-middle-aged married couple in the whole of the London suburbs. Unfolding in four episodes pegged to the seasons, Another Year’s arc covers the widening gulf between Tom and Gerri’s entitled…
No Strings Attached is extremely narrow in focus: It’s “just” about two people in lust struggling to put away their respective baggage in order to have a real relationship with each other. Adam (Ashton Kutcher) drunkenly texts every girl in his phone and wakes up the next morning at the…
Tracking the parallel trajectories of three employees laid off from cushy corporate jobs at the same Boston-based manufacturing conglomerate, The Company Men is transparent in its ambition to capture The Way We Live Now from a sensitive, equitable — rather than a withering and satiric — point of view. Writer/director…
John Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole plops us down in the lives of Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart), 40-ish upper-class marrieds rattling around an East Coast dream house. Becca and Howie’s young son was killed in an accident, and months later, the couple is trying to cope. Howie thinks…
Derek Cianfrance’s divorce drama Blue Valentine is the story of how a couple (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) travels from too-cute introduction to irreconcilable differences in just over half a decade. Starting with the present-day married-with-kid Dean and Cindy, Cianfrance weaves long flashbacks of Dean and Cindy’s early days through…
Kelly Canter is the Courtney Love of country stars. Spectacular meltdowns on stage have forced Kelly (an inconsistently twanging Gwyneth Paltrow) into rehab. There, her decolletage decked out in black lace and a bling cross, she jams in more than one sense with singer-songwriter-janitor Beau (Tron fox Garrett Hedlund), until…
