You’ll witness no border-crossing histrionics in writer-director Antonio Méndez Esparza’s first feature, which translates as “Here and There”; the film is as simple, straightforward, and elegant as its title. Featuring a cast of nonprofessionals — many playing versions of themselves and all naturals in front of the camera — Aquí…
For the past two decades, Eytan Fox has been Israel’s foremost chronicler of gay life — and the homoeroticized military — in the land of milk and honey. With Yossi, he has pulled off the rare feat of making a sequel that surpasses the original. Released in 2002, the director’s…
A chiller about two abandoned little girls and their bond to the wraith of the title, Mama never delivers the primal terror its premise would suggest. Instead, the movie — the first feature by Andy Muschietti, who co-scripted with his sibling Barbara and Neil Cross — distracts with too much…
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to watch Jacques Audiard’s outrageous melodrama Rust and Bone without laughing. Loosely adapted from two works in Craig Davidson’s 2005 short-story collection of the same name, Rust and Bone finds Audiard returning to the overdetermined characters and swift redemption…
When the words true story appear twice in a film’s opening disclaimer, it’s a guarantee that what follows will include at least one questionable fiction. The Impossible is inspired by the Alvarez Belons, a Spanish family of five who survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed almost 300,000 lives;…
Most of the blathering last year about the death of film and film culture has already evaporated from the mind, like so much inert gas. But one gnomic pronouncement endures: Leos Carax describing cinema as “a beautiful island with a cemetery” following the world premiere of Holy Motors at Cannes…
An empathic, absorbing tale of the old and the beautiful, Starlet tracks an unlikely intergenerational friendship in the San Fernando Valley. Florida transplant Jane (Dree Hemingway) is employed by one of the area’s main engines of commerce, breaking into the XXX industry and cheerfully working adult-movie trade shows. When not…
Raconteuse, epigrammatist, and mythomaniac, peerless fashion editor Diana Vreeland (1903 – 89) might have loved words as much as she loved Balenciaga. As Harold Koda of the Met’s Costume Institute, for which Vreeland served as a special consultant from 1973 until her death, memorably says in this often-charming nonfiction bauble,…
“You were really and truly inside me,” Helen Hunt’s sex surrogate, Cheryl, assures her client, 36-year-old Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes), a poet and journalist confined to an iron lung after contracting polio as a child, who doesn’t want to die a virgin. Similarly, The Sessions, written and directed by Ben…
“Little White Lies” Movie Review: A Bloated Spin on “The Big Chill”
In anticipation of the remake of the 1976 girl-group melodrama I (which didn’t screen in time for our deadline)—Whitney Houston’s posthumous film appearance and her return to movies after a 15-year absence—we look back at the handful of celluloid performances by the woman once known as ” the Voice.” Houston’s…
Sarah Polley’s second feature, much like her first, the superb Away From Her (2006), thoughtfully probes the pitfalls of coupledom and third-party threats. Five years into their marriage, Torontonians Margot (Michelle Williams) and Lou (Seth Rogen) have regressed fully into sexlessness, heat and mystery having been supplanted by baby-talking, bathroom…
Fans of Seth MacFarlane’s Fox mainstay Family Guy who wish he would run afoul of FCC regulations every week might be pleased with Ted, the story of a 35-year-old man and his foul-talking teddy bear. Plushies too might be turned on by the pot-smoking, whore-banging CGI toy ursus of the…
I’d rather die than be like you,” the barely adolescent heroine of Pixar’s 13th feature roars to her mother, perhaps the most radical line ever uttered in a Disney production—and one that highlights just how different Brave’s heroine’s predicament is from those of her recent screen sistren. Where fellow bow-and-arrow…
Three generations of fine actresses are squandered in Peace, Love & Misunderstanding, an incompetently structured film that pits hippies against squares with the usual wearying results. This head-hammering, clash-of-values, family-healing dramedy makes sure to literalize all of its uplifting messages; gentle admonitions about “letting go” are immediately followed by a…
Single mother Grace (Eva Mendes) toils as a maid and a waitress to keep her petulant daughter, Ansiedad (Cierra Ramirez), in private school in Seattle. Although the teenager’s name translates as “anxiety,” she exhibits no fear or apprehension when, inspired by an English class on rites of passage taught by…
“Animals are such agreeable friends — they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms,” George Eliot once wrote. That’s certainly the appeal of Freeway, a stray mutt rescued by Beth Winter (Diane Keaton), unhappily married to overweening, distant surgeon Joseph (Kevin Kline) in Darling Companion. The handsome pooch is also…
Drawing baths and listening to classical music, refined soldier-of-fortune Martin (Willem Dafoe) is sent Down Under by a military-biotech firm that wants him to bring back a Tasmanian tiger. Although the crocodile-jawed creature was declared extinct in the 1930s, sightings hav e been reported, and the company wishes to exploit…
The Five-Year Engagement is as comfy and cute as the bunny costume Tom (Jason Segel) wears at the New Year’s Eve party where he meets Violet (Emily Blunt). The movie opens in San Francisco, on their one-year anniversary, the night Tom proposes. They postpone the wedding so they can get…
Based on Original King of Comedy and Family Feud host Steve Harvey’s self-help primer Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, this adaptation often plays like a book on tape. The women characters, advising one another about 90-day rules and “controlling the cookie,” begin their lines with “As Steve…
“If no one watches, then they don’t have a game,” a teenager says in this faithful if cautious adaptation of the first volume of Suzanne Collins’ astronomically successful dystopic YA trilogy. A withering indictment of omnipresent screens, endless spectacle, and debased celebrity culture, The Hunger Games was inspired, the author…
With her ponytail and toggle coat, Audrey Tautou, playing workaholic widow Nathalie in Delicacy, gives off a sexless, cutie-pie charm — not as aggressively as she did in Amélie but still gratingly. The actress, therefore, is perfect for this dainty, inconsequential romantic dramedy, the first film from brothers David and…
