Another poor, massive, uneducated African-American teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile, and ever-grateful to the…
I’m Not There screenwriter Oren Moverman makes his directorial debut with The Messenger, a moving and nuanced drama about the home-front readjustment period for decorated Iraq War hero Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) who, after surviving a roadside blast, has been reassigned as a casualty notification officer. He is partnered with…
Bella: I’m coming. Edward: I don’t want you to. —The Twilight Saga: New Moon Worry not for the purity of your tween girls, global mothers. Where Catherine Hardwicke’s lively, irreverent take on the first book in the Twilight series at least made room for a few suggestive winks, the sequel…
The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning, Oprah-endorsed post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem — in which a father and his 10-year-old son traverse a despoiled landscape of unspeakable horror — was a quick, lacerating read. John Hillcoat’s literal adaptation, which arrives one Thanksgiving past its original release date is, by contrast, a…
The Boondock Saints filmmaker Troy Duffy certainly makes for an easy target — at least his former friends thought so when they made the 2003 doc Overnight, a rise-fall-and-turnaround portrait of Duffy’s hubris and recklessness during the making of his first and only film. To his credit, not only did…
Seven months after its theatrical release in the United Kingdom and two months after its DVD debut there, Pirate Radio washes ashore in U.S. theaters with a different title (it was formerly known as The Boat That Rocked) and most of its better bits excised. Writer/director Richard Curtis, paying homage…
Completing his multifilm vendetta against the world’s tourist trade, German-born director Roland Emmerich sends the mother of all storms to level the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower, and a priest-filled Vatican City in his newest end-times thriller, 2012. From Independence Day (1996) to The Day After Tomorrow (2004), taking down…
Historical cataclysm produces conspiratorial thinking: Germany’s loss in World War I, the JFK assassination, and 9/11 are all naturally understood as the stuff of unimaginable plots, unspeakable cover-ups, and unseen forces. The guys who made The Men Who Stare at Goats can’t quite decide whether this syndrome is risible or…
To call Audience With the Queens a documentary would insult the word documentary and burden this little trifle with expectations it can never match. Purporting to be a look at Key West’s drag queens, “on and offstage,” in practice the film is little more than a half-hour postcard for the…
The Red Army Faction robbed banks, planted bombs, shot cops, and assassinated judges for the better part of the decade that followed the convulsions of 1968. Directed from Bernd Eichinger’s screenplay by Uli Edel, The Baader Meinhof Complex is a sweeping, hectic docudrama. Despite a large cast, the film focuses…
Seventysomething Melvin Van Peebles plays the lead role from age 15 to 45 in this homely home-video-art love story. He’s opposite actors who are, in every case, younger, making the scenes of teenaged sexual discovery particularly eyebrow-raising. Like practically everything in the movie, the device really “works” only on a…
Every year, while prescreening Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival entries for human consumption, a little indie gem invariably jumps out. Punching the Clown, Gregori Viens’ fable on fame and the record industry meat grinder, is 2009’s leaper. Henry Phillips, who cowrote the script with Viens and supplied all the music,…
Seventy-one years after Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast snookered a gullible American public with its real-time alien-invasion scenario, The Fourth Kind writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi tries a similar gambit, albeit with less showmanship than Welles had in his pinkie finger. Likely rushed into cinemas to cash in on…
This film aims wide and misses, its satire of the contemporary-art scene seemingly lifted from the transcripts of late-’80s Senate debates about the NEA. It centers around two highly competitive brothers: Josh (Eion Bailey), a successful painter of dull hotel art; and Adrian (Adam Goldberg), a perpetually indignant, brow-furrowing composer…
Danish director Lone Scherfig’s An Education is a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center. Based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir, An Education arrives in cinemas at a curious moment indeed for a movie about a headstrong 16-year-old who gives herself to…
We call it soccer, but for the Brits, it’s football, and it’s damned serious business. From 1968 to 1974, Brian Clough (Michael Sheen), a manager/coach from the tiny town of Derby, and his assistant manager, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), turned a third-rate club into division champs. That success wasn’t nearly…
Chess hasn’t been this sexy or subversive since The Thomas Crown Affair. A French film directed by Caroline Bottaro, Queen to Play follows a middle-aged hotel maid Hellene (Sandrine Bonnaire) who, after seeing a couple engage in some seriously, sexually tense chess on their hotel balcony, decides to take up…
Ah, the Matthew Broderick stoner movie. Ferris Bueller all grown up, divorced, disappointed, a weekend father, looking chubby and unshaven, waking and baking in a squalid apartment he shares with a cheerful Senegalese roomie (Michael K. Williams). Weaned on Neil Simon plays, Broderick has always been a much better actor…
Less documentary than closely and manipulatively edited homage to the new-agey “genius” of frequent Michael Jackson collaborator and High School Musical auteur Kenny Ortega, This Is It is about as honest as the song it’s named after—which was co-written with and then stolen from Paul Anka in 1983, sold to…
Cody Unser became paralyzed in 1999 when her immune system attacked her spinal cord. She developed an intense headache, and numbness crept up from her legs to her hips and finally to her chest, all in under an hour. The symptoms were part of an uncommon neurological disorder called transverse…
Black Dynamite opens with three drug-dealing pimps lined up outside a limousine. A shadowy man rolls down the window and informs them there’s a traitor in their midst. After a few awkward, sideways glances, the pimp in the middle begins spewing poorly executed jive talk with a British accent. That’s…
Alaska’s Mount Saint Elias is the third-tallest mountain in North America, and it is notoriously unfriendly. It was first climbed in 1897, and it was then all but forgotten. Uncommonly close to tidewater for such a large mountain, its weather is extremely volatile. Near the top, it is often hellish…
