Chloe is posh, cool, and never less than obvious. The movie was adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson from Anne Fontaine’s marital thriller Nathalie…, and it’s a sophisticated Gallic shrug-fest hailed by some for featuring an adulterous triangle unimaginable in an American movie. Successful gynecologist Catherine (Julianne Moore) suspects, not without…
It would take more than three dimensions to craft something special out of this adequate but unremarkable animated tale of a skinny Viking nerd-boy (voiced by Jay Baruchel) named Hiccup who befriends fire-breathing dragons hoping to impress his father (Gerard Butler), a beefy Norseman with a Glasgow accent and triceps…
Animals and people are all jumbled up in this hyperactive Belgian puppet animation — as in A Town Called Panic’s central ménage of Cowboy, Indian, and Horse. The filmmakers, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, show little regard for scale and less for convention. Cowboy (Aubier) is a screeching hysteric, and…
No, not the parkas. The fearsome north face of the Eiger mountain became the object of national socialist obsession during the ’30s. An Olympic gold medal was promised to its first summit party — preferably to be of good, blond Aryan stock, and the Nazi press glorified those alpinists who…
It’s hard not to picture Polanski under house arrest in Gstaad editing his diverting new thriller, in which a former British prime minister dodges extradition while having his memoirs rewritten. Then again, when your life is like a mashup of the History Channel’s entire catalog of shock programming, autobiography will…
What’s remarkable about Still Walking, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s seventh feature film, is that the familiar comes across as fresh. Despite recycling potential clichés — the grouchy elderly father, the disenfranchised second son — Kore-eda imbues his story with such specificity, tactility, and humanity that yet another movie about a dysfunctional…
Essentially a locked-room mystery with lashings of gore and sexual brutality, Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo disguised the simplicity of its narrative by embedding it within an almost Balzacian depiction of Swedish society, warts and all (but mainly warts). Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation relies more on…
With stick figures and crisply funny journal entries, Jeff Kinney’s cartoon series breathed fresh life into pre-teen lit’s most exhausted trope—the twisted tribal etiquette of middle school. Screenwriters Jackie and Jeff Filgo’s respect for Kinney’s sharply observant dialogue is the chief virtue of this fairly capable screen version. But the…
You’ve followed their packaged romance in the supermarket checkout line — now see the movie. Jennifer Aniston’s hair plays a New York Daily News crime reporter who stumbles onto corruption at the precinct house. Gerard Butler’s scowl plays her ex, a former policeman now working as a bounty hunter. For…
Another wholesale dystopian future, just like the last one. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker are two repo men punching their timecards for The Union Inc. Their job is to hunt down those recipients of synthetic organ transplants who’ve fallen behind on payments, then retrieve company property at the point of…
Putatively a new romance starring Robert Pattinson, Remember Me begins like a vigilante movie: a Brooklyn subway platform, 1991; a racially charged stickup; an 11-year-old girl watches her mother get shot. It’s the first sign that here is a film that won’t content itself with just charting the little measures…
Paul Greengrass’ expertly assembled Green Zone has evidently been parked for some time on Universal’s shelf. Had the movie been released during the 2008 election season, it might have been something more than entertainment. Still, Green Zone, which could have more accurately been titled Told You So, Jerk-Off!, does gain…
This isn’t entirely without its selling points, chief among them T.J. Miller, who’s a cross between Seth Rogen and Jason Segel — paging Judd Apatow, now. Miller plays Stainer, a moptopped giant and best bud to Kirk (Jay Baruchel, an Apatow player from way back), a TSA lackey and a…
All that remains of Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day is Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning performance, his baddest and best. The rest of the movie? A blustering stumble toward parody — an overwrought, operatic buddy-cop flip-flop also starring Ethan Hawke as the rookie put to the test again and again by the devil…
The Miami International Film Festival has never quite gained the Olympian status of other South Florida arts events. But in the festival’s 27th incarnation, which begins this week, 115 movies will be screened across five venues, perhaps signaling that it’s finally ready for a bigger stage. Festival director Tiziana Finzi,…
Walt Disney mulled an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for decades before producing an animated feature in 1951, although by all accounts, he didn’t much care for the prim little protagonist, let alone her supporting cast of “weird characters.” One wonders what Uncle Walt would have made of his studio’s…
Detective stories imply that mysteries can be solved or at least rationally explained. Even the most debased example is a secular article of faith that also confirms a universe in which guilt is determined and the guilty accorded just deserts. Such are the underpinnings of 34-year-old Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu’s…
Cop Out establishes its movie lineage right away, with a slow-motion toe-to-head tilt up, set to the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn.” Black-cop/white-cop buddies Jimmy and Paul swagger stone-faced toward the camera. Director/editor Kevin Smith immortalizes his heroes as stock crime-flick badasses in their very first frame. Smith complicates…
“It’s Dad. He’s got a knife.” So do many of the dads in the Midwestern town of Ogden Marsh, where men and women alike are suddenly developing blank stares and homicidal urges. The boy hiding in a closet with Mom, while Dad stalks them with that kitchen knife, is destined…
It’s hard to believe that Americans of Romani heritage (better known as Gypsies) still suffer social alienation. And Searching for the 4th Nail, a documentary that tries to explain the history of Gypsies while providing insight into their struggle for survival and respect, doesn’t really convince you that the alienation…
The animated films fall into two subsections: the shorter, cuter entries and the longer, more ambitious nominees. Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty is a one-joke bit about a cranky grandmother, while The Lady and the Reaper recounts a cheeky battle between death and a doctor over the life of a frail…
Like the animated shorts, the live-action nominees can be neatly divided into serious films about imperiled children and darkly comic movies about goofy adults. Writer/director Gregg Helvey’s Kavi dully follows the Dickensian plight of a poor Indian boy who longs to end his indentured servitude so he can attend school…
