Post Grad Post Grad tries to do three things at once — and half-hits the mark on only one. Part of it is wacky Little Miss Sunshine family time, with Carol Burnett in the Alan Arkin part and Michael Keaton as the clueless paterfamilias. Part is sketch comedy, which is not half-bad, especially…
The aliens have been with us for 20 years already at the start of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mothership and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the space…
Adam There’s not much to get passionate about in this amiable chamber piece from theater director Max Mayer. Hedging just about every bet it lays on the table to the tune of a gentle guitar, Adam spins a wish-fulfilling romance between a recently bereaved young man with Asperger’s syndrome (Hugh…
Making headline writers’ lives everywhere easier: The Goods doesn’t deliver. Don Ready (Jeremy Piven, not changing a note from Entourage) is a hired-gun slasher salesman, the guy you call when your used-car business is in trouble. With his team, Don’s a genius at clearing out stagnant lots. Producers Adam McKay…
“When you bad,” boasts the young and beautiful, piss-and-vinegar-filled Muhammad Ali early in the documentary Soul Power, “you can do what you wanna do.” The film, which takes too long to get to the meat of its matter but captivates once it does, documents the three-day music festival that accompanied…
Late in the infectiously frisky documentary The Cove, an older man calmly gate-crashes an international conference on whaling with a television screen strapped to his chest, showing bloody images of the mass slaughter of dolphins in a pretty cove off the coast of Japan. It’s a show-stopping publicity stunt by…
Julie and Julia There’s half of a great movie here — the one featuring Meryl Streep as Julia Child, and not the Smithsonian-enshrined, encased-in-amber, forever-in-reruns Julia Child either but the toweringly lean and tremendously lustful Julia Child, new to France in the late 1940s and ready to devour everything in…
Credited as the first “action figure,” G.I. Joe came to life in 1964 as Hasbro’s answer to Mattel’s Barbie doll. There were actually four Joes — one for each branch of the armed forces — and in the imaginations of boys everywhere, they fought Nazis. Forty-odd years later, the Joes…
After devoting his first two films as director, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, to getting laid and having kids, respectively, Judd Apatow brings the circle of life to a close with Funny People, which stars Adam Sandler as George Simmons, a popular movie star diagnosed with a rare and…
On the surface, (500) Days of Summer really is no different from, oh, let’s say The Proposal, in which Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock spun box-office gold from romantic comedy’s refrigerator fuzz. Former music-video maker Marc Webb’s feature debut is as conventional as any made-for-cable rom-com, down to its soft-indie-rock…
ShrinkWe know Kevin Spacey is one depressed psychiatrist because he doesn’t shave and he chain-smokes pot. (What Elliott Gould did for cigarettes in The Long Goodbye, Spacey does for joints in Shrink.) Broadly about therapy, Jonas Pate’s film is also about the dark side of Hollywood, which he signifies by…
Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (mumblecordeon Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess that they’re too tired to procreate that night and then confess their mutual relief. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2…
Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the yearlong rotation of a three-man U.S…
Anvil! The Story of Anvil Even though Anvil, a four-piece speed-metal circus that once toured with soon-to-be cash-cow longhairs like Whitesnake and Bon Jovi, never amounted to anything more than “the demigods of Canadian metal,” guitarist Steve “Lips” Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner decided early on that their sole objective…
Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering…
If you think it’s impossible to underestimate the cultural significance of American Idol, go see British filmmaker Havana Marking’s documentary about its Afghani imitator, a smash hit television show whose musical wannabes run the gamut of Afghanistan’s bruising ethnic divisions. The even more socially and geographically heterogeneous audience votes for…
It’s said that heterosexuals can’t understand camp because everything they do is camp. Such, more or less, is the method of the new Sacha Baron Cohen extravaganza, Brüno. Directed by guerrilla filmmaker Larry Charles, Brüno is often hilarious. Is it a minstrel show? Co-opting gay culture? Evidence of new tolerance?…
The stately Japanese movie Departures comes into theaters trailing some justified ill will for having trounced the critical favorite, Israel’s Waltz With Bashir, for Best Foreign Film at last year’s Academy Awards. It’s not hard to fathom what academy voters, who skew mature, saw in Departures, an earnest appeal for…
Moon, directed by British advert tyro Duncan Jones, is a modest science-fiction film with major aspirations. Jones’ debut is pleased to engage genre behemoths — 2001, Solaris, Blade Runner— as well as B-movie classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The tale of a lonely spaceman might have made an…
Adoration Atom Egoyan’s 12th feature film offers a typically kaleidoscopic rumination on voyeurism, videography, the relative nature of truth, and the aftermath of tragedy. It’s closer in form and tone to the Canadian auteur’s early work (particularly his 1987 masterpiece Family Viewing) than to his erratic recent literary adaptations (Felicia’s…
As Depression-era bank-robber-cum-folk-hero John Dillinger surveys the clientele of a chic Chicago eatery in a key scene from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, he declares: “They’re all about where people come from. Nobody seems to wonder where somebody’s going.” And much like its subject, Mann’s exhilarating movie exists in a state…
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs Though hardly landmarks of narrative or animation art, the first two Ice Ages were warm, goofy, and appealing; John Leguizamo’s adorably sibilant Sid the Sloth remains a much-quoted guy in our household. But as with Shrek and countless other overextended studio franchises, the well…
