Character is destiny — at least for Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. Allen’s exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia opens with a snatch of Groucho Marx singing his trademark paradoxical assertion (“Hello, I must be going”) and is powered almost entirely by the presence of a single, larger-than-life, and less-than-likable figure. Whatever…
American Black Film Festival South Florida is home to more than a few film festivals. Whether you’re a woman or a Jew, gay or Brazilian, there’s a celebration of your group’s cinematic acumen. This weekend, the American Black Film Festival (ABFF) will shine the spotlight on films produced and directed…
Midway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers’ solipsistic, terminally apologetic-for-being-solipsistic portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-slacker-messiah, the author, upon interviewing to become a cast member of MTV’s The Real World, makes the following observation about his generation of self-obsessed, media-savvy technobrats: “These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially…
Fifteen minutes after seeing The Proposal, I’d forgotten I’d seen The Proposal. Well, that’s not entirely true: By then, it had simply merged in my memory with a thousand other films just like it — those in which phony lovers bound together by dubious circumstances become honest-to-kissin’ couples in just…
Tulpan A small mob of camels stampedes by a nomad’s tent. Inside, a young guy in a sailor suit sits on the rug, cheerfully recounting his death struggle with an octopus to the impassive middle-aged couple he’s hoping will be his in-laws. Miscellaneous brays punctuate Asa’s story, which is interrupted…
What Fletch was to plaid-checked water-cooler wits in the ’80s, what National Lampoon’s Van Wilder was to college-bound douches at the dawn of Dubya, that’s what 2003’s Old School is to Gen-X frat rats — a secret-handshake movie. A shaggy, intermittently hilarious wish-fulfillment nightmare about sorta dissatisfied, sorta middle-aged dudesters…
Although Brazil is often associated with beach-bronzed Amazons, Carnaval, soccer, and painful bikini waxes, its cinema has a rich, oft-overlooked history. In 1930, the film Limite by director Mario Peixoto became a silent film masterpiece. In the 1960s, after a military coup resulted in dictatorship, an avant-garde film movement called…
Easy Virtue Quick! Noël Coward—sage or supercilious bitch? No matter where you stand, Stephan Elliott’s deliciously cheeky screen adaptation of one of the satirist’s lesser-known jabs at the British upper crust will charm your pants off. The movie opens with a contemporary rendition of Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” impressively…
Sam Raimi wants to go home again. Often a drifting virtuoso in the years before finding his Spider-Man gig, with Drag Me to Hell, Raimi defaults to the horror romps that made his name (namely, the Evil Dead trilogy), bringing the old barreling camera and viscous ickiness back and serving…
Up First of all, Up is not a movie about a cranky old coot who, with the help of a roly-poly Boy Scout, finds his inner child during a series of magical adventures experienced from the front porch of a dilapidated manse held aloft by hundreds of helium-filled balloons. Such,…
Both warning and advertisement, the Terminator films are technophobic teases, selling tickets by promising this decade’s model of killing machine: the classic V8 1984 Schwarzenegger; the bullet-streamlined, liquid-metal ’91 Robert Patrick of T2: Judgment Day; Kristanna Loken’s 2003 T-X (with burgundy pleather upholstery). Terminator Salvation, a departure in many ways,…
Rudo y Cursi Not quite The Further Adventures of Cain & Abel, the second coming of Beavis & Butt-head, or Peyton Meets Eli, but energetic fun nonetheless, Rudo y Cursi is a multiple-brother act: It’s written and directed by Carlos Cuarón and produced by elder sibling Alfonso, director of Y…
The cinema is not a slice of life but a piece of cake,” Alfred Hitchcock once said, and if that’s true, then summertime is when we gorge — unhealthily, most of the time, on ear-splitting smash-’em-ups and nerd-filled sex comedies. This year’s summer movie season is sure to contain its…
The Escapist A taut thriller that ends on a note of unexpected grace, the British prison drama The Escapist marks the impressive feature debut of director/cowriter Rupert Wyatt. As tightly scripted as the meticulous escape plan hatched by lifer Frank Perry (Brian Cox), the film jumps back and forth between…
It’s difficult for this longtime Trekkie to review J.J. Abrams’ relaunching of the USS Enterprise. It’s difficult to dispassionately dole out compliments and complaints per the job description. Because, yes, the professional critic understands: This is Paramount Pictures’ latest effort to jump-start a profitable but long-stalled franchise, to do for…
I love beauty — it’s not my fault,” the perpetually orange, shellacked septuagenarian Valentino sniffs to reporters backstage at his spring prêt-à-porter show in February 2007. Filming the last year of the designer’s reign — Valentino retired in September 2007 after 45 years in haute couture — dedicated follower of…
Two weeks after jowly Matthew Perry transformed into pretty Zac Efron to relive his adolescence in 17 Again, Warner Bros. releases Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, another backward and backward-looking child-is-father-to-the-man rom-com. Matthew McConaughey stars as NYC celebrity photographer Connor Mead, a horndog who tries to convince his kid brother, about…
The Soloist opens with newspapers thudding onto lawns, a quaint sight that makes the movie practically a period piece, even though the events that inspired it took place within the past four years. An old-fashioned tale for a newfangled world, the movie turns on a series of columns begun in…
The Palm Beach International Film Festival runs April 23 to May 3 and features 120-plus movies playing in five venues — plus parties, filmmaking and marketing seminars, and, for some reason, an appearance by the kindly-eyed human from Babe, film actor James Cromwell. To find out more, check out pbfilmfest.org…
Kevin Macdonald’s Washington thriller is a bellows designed to puff up the most beaten-down reporter’s chest. Compressed from the highly regarded BBC miniseries first telecast in 2003, State of Play is an effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer. There are more than a few…
The Golden Boys You can feel yourself growing older in the 90 minutes it takes to watch this horrid piece of filmed dinner theater starring Rip Torn, Bruce Dern, and David Carradine as a trio of crusty former sea captains living under the same roof in 1905 Cape Cod. Based…
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have transformed some of the saggiest, most clichéd genres with smarts, non-screechy politics, superb acting, and visual beauty. Though, on paper, its premise could have easily elicited groans, Half Nelson —their 2006 feature debut (that Fleck directed and the two co-wrote) about a white middle-class…
