The television show 21 Jump Street, about cops who go undercover as high schoolers, debuted on Fox in 1987 and ran until 1991. As a sign of the progress made since the Reagan-Bush era, the mixed-bag, big-screen 21 Jump Street mocks the program’s lethal earnestness with retrograde raunch, packing in…
Belting out the anthem “Les Filles du Crazy,” half a dozen women sing of themselves: “They are the soldiers of the erotic army.” The military metaphor proves apt for this spellbinding documentary on the Crazy Horse, Paris’ classy nudie cabaret, founded in 1951. The dancers’ taut, perfectly proportioned bodies suggest…
A sensitive portrait of childhood just before pubescence — when bodies and identities are still fluid — Tomboy astutely explores the freedom, however brief, of being untethered to the highly rule-bound world of gender codes. About 20 minutes elapse before we learn the real name and biological sex of a…
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island continues the weak Jules Verne-inspired adventures of 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. The production design appears inspired by Yes album covers and Candy Land. Of the original cast and major crew, only Josh Hutcherson, as Sean, a sulky teenaged Vernian, returns. Sean…
The Conquest is a brisk, fascinating chronicle of Nicolas Sarkozy. It time-shifts from May 6, 2007— the day he was both elected president of France and left by his second wife, Cécilia, for good — to the five years leading up to his victory. It’s all pre-Carla Bruni and illuminates…
This film follows two parallel story lines: one featuring a thoroughly insufferable little girl, the other a pleasingly grumpy middle-aged widow. Scrawny, bespectacled, precocious 11-year-old Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic), disgusted by the futility of her bourgeois existence, plans to kill herself on her next birthday — a scheme announced, as…
Fulfilling a mission that has consumed her for almost two decades, Glenn Close — as producer, cowriter, and lead — brings to the screen the titular character, a woman who passes as a man in 1890s Ireland. The result of this passion project? Getting to look like Bruce Jenner in…
A holy hot mess of the sacred and the inane, Joyful Noise, about a gospel choir in Pacashau, Georgia, is Jesus for Gleeks. Less Bible-thumping than, say, a Tyler Perry project, writer/director Todd Graff’s movie is still on an ecumenical outreach mission, its flatlining gags overshadowed by its focus on…
Frustratingly opaque, Australian novelist-turned-filmmaker Julia Leigh’s debut feature opens with an unforgettable image: A young woman, earning some extra cash as a medical-research subject, patiently sits as a long tube is threaded down her esophagus. Sharp and precise as its tableau might be, though, Sleeping Beauty never burrows into the…
An undeniably charming homage to Hollywood in the late 1920s, The Artist will probably be the most successful silent movie since the days of the Gish sisters. It might also be the first silent film many of its viewers have ever seen. Although many of the technical aspects of the…
Big, soft, squishy: These words describe Jonah Hill’s heart as well as his body in The Sitter, the mixed-bag last record of its star’s physique before a radical slim-down. As the film opens, Hill’s layabout Noah, kicked out of college and living at home in the suburbs of New York…
Mayans might have predicted the end of the world in 2012, but could they have known that the countdown to eternal hellfire would begin with the multigenerational-celebrity-glutted New Year’s Eve? New York City serves as the metropolis flattened by dull location shots and ethnic caricatures: Sofía Vergara, playing a sous…
This documentary on Kevin Clash — the kind, gentle man who created the Muppet beloved by every single child in the world — rushes through intriguing points its interviewees bring up to devote more time to banalities. Instead of hearing more from the colleague who exhorted Clash, “Jim [Henson] doesn’t…
The pleasing sounds of Carmen Maura’s whispery Castilian lisp open this 1962-set film about the friendship between a Parisian captain of industry and a group of Spanish maids. But all the words that follow assault the ear in this unnecessary rehashing of the earthy virtues of low-paid laborers versus the…
Desperately trying to appeal to not just the Gen X’ers who grew up with Kermit but also to the tykes who’ve never even heard of Jim Henson, The Muppets has none of the easy confidence of the original TV show or movie. The reboot is largely the labor of love…
After 20 years together, 40-ish arts professionals Hanna (Sophie Rois) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper) have succumbed to bed death. Other stresses burden the relationship: the passing of Simon’s mother, his diagnosis of testicular cancer soon after, the insistence of writer/director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, The International) on constantly using…
The doobie brothers are back, though wildly diverging lifestyle choices have left the best bud-loving buds all but estranged. Harold (John Cho) continues his ascent at his Wall Street firm, returning each night to his suburban nest, where wife Maria (Paula Garcés) greets him with a demand for baby-making sex…
For his third film, outer-borough sensationalist Dito Montiel sets most of the action in Astoria, the Queens neighborhood that dominated his first, 2006’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. He reteams with Channing Tatum, the star of all his features, here playing Jonathan White, a second-generation cop tormented by the…
Sure to be drowned out by the drum circles at the Occupy protests, writer/director J.C. Chandor’s lifeless Margin Call depicts roughly 36 hours at an unnamed Manhattan investment firm at the dawn of the 2008 financial freak-out. Chandor’s debut feature audaciously asks us to empathize with obscenely overpaid risk analysts…
Standing outside his small-town Ohio home, his wife and child busy preparing breakfast inside, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) looks up at the ominous, slate-gray sky in the first scene of Take Shelter. The clouds open, raining down oily, piss-colored droplets. It’s end-of-days weather, a phenomenon that only Curtis seems to…
After 20 years together, 40-ish arts professionals Hanna (Sophie Rois) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper) have succumbed to bed death. Other stresses burden the relationship: the passing of Simon’s mother, his diagnosis of testicular cancer soon after, the insistence of writer/director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, The International) on constantly using…
Based on the true story of Sam Childers — an ex-con, druggie, gun nut, and self-described “hillbilly from Pennsylvania” who got right with the Lord and built an orphanage for Sudanese refugees — Machine Gun Preacher is the umpteenth onscreen iteration of a white savior aiding the most desperate in…
