The Blind Side

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…

The Messenger

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…

Too Much Angst, Not Enough Saga in The Twilight Saga: New Moon

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 Review: Cormac McCarthy Adaptation Takes path of Least Resistance

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…

2012 Shows That the End of CGI Marvel Is Over

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…

The Baader Meinhof Complex a Hectic Docudrama

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…

Punching the Clown Is a Standout at FLIFF

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,…

The Fourth Kind Is No Kind of War of the Worlds

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…

(Untitled) Aims High and Arty With a Standard Love Triangle

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…

An Education and Its Star, Carey Mulligan, Get Good Marks

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…

The Damned United

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…

Queen to Play

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…

Wonderful World

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…

This Is It Review: The King of Pop Goes out with a Wimper

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…

Disabled but Fierce

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…