Land Ho! is a How Grandpa Got His Groove Back for the geezer set, a buddy road trip through Iceland, starring two divorced men with a combined age of 150 years. The writer/directors, Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz, are 30 and 34, respectively, young enough to be their leading men’s…
In his debut feature, Justin Schwarz is clearly drawing from the same bag of tricks as many of his indie comedy predecessors, but he’s refining them. Even his wide, Wes Andersonian compositions have a purpose. Paintings are everywhere in this film about shaping history, setting up a nostalgic framework before…
Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap. The director, Michel Gondry, has a brilliant, contradictory brain. He’s a swoony pessimist, a big-dreaming romantic who believes in love at first sight but never lets his films end with a kiss. Instead, his idea of a…
Star presence, that distillation of charisma and sometimes glamour, lies at the heart of the movies’ appeal. The star presence James Harvey evokes so richly in his new book, Watching Them Be, is never simply about physical beauty. Harvey rightly points out that Ingrid Bergman’s fresh unaffectedness was distinctly unglamorous,…
Daniel Radcliffe’s first trip to Comic-Con kicked off like the world’s cuddliest Nuremberg rally. This summer, just minutes after he walked into Hall H, the hangar-sized sardine can of 6,500 people sang him “Happy Birthday.” It was an emotional moment for everyone. “The fact that I was turning 25 slightly…
Before you buy that tiny box turtle in Chinatown, know that it can live for 100 years. Which means that among all the Mad Libs nonsense of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — a comic book-turned-media-phenomenon that’s always half-admitted it’s a goof — at least the teenage part is accurate…
Incompatible fronts collide in director Steven Quale’s weather-horror patience-tester Into the Storm. The first is the summertime yen for righteous kablooey, the dumber the better, exemplified here by drunk galoots hauling ass into a twister on a four-wheeler ATV, tossing beer cans and whooping about getting a “million YouTube hits.”…
Suppose you are in high school and your interest in movies has begun to run deeper than multiplex fare. You may find yourself gravitating to a particular kind of intellectual film: the dour, the twisty, and the ostentatious must be regarded as the pinnacle of the form, because, you feel,…
The business of childhood is the business of waiting: waiting for Christmas, waiting for school to let out, waiting to be old enough to stay up past 9. No other movie I can think of better captures the wistfulness of those days full of waiting than Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, an…
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen has taught us, and apparently what his heart wants these days is not to have to bother with writing second drafts of film scripts. His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, plays like a sumptuous vacation, its stars larking in ’20s finery about…
Beware the movie that’s Fun! with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters that say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you’ve always liked but perhaps haven’t…
The most radical thing about this eco-terrorism drama is its quiet patience and formal vigor. While most studio pictures slap together their images with all the care of a grocery-store deli clerk assembling the ham and carrots on a cheap-o party platter, Kelly Reichardt, the director of Night Moves, favors…
Violette is a film consumed by hunger, as was its heroine, the French writer Violette Leduc: hunger for love, for companionship, for artistic validation. Portrayed with flickering levels of ferocity by the supple-faced Emmanuelle Devos, Leduc forcefully grasps at potential paramours and sucks down cigarettes with the intensity of a…
James Brown stripped pop to its rhythmic essentials: the groove and the grunt, the bridge, and the scream. Tate Taylor’s Get On Up likewise reduces James Brown — and the biopic form — to all that matters most. Here are the highs of the man’s life, both artistic and recreational…
With Jack Nicholson still enjoying his retirement, it falls to Michael Douglas to swoon over the oh-so-cutesy Diane Keaton in And So It Goes, a timid, elder rom-com in the same wheelhouse as the 2003 Nicholson-Keaton team-up, Something’s Gotta Give. A film of nothing but soft edges, director Rob Reiner’s…
One could be forgiven for being skeptical that a Hercules movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and directed by Brett “Rush Hour Trilogy” Ratner might have a brain in its head, but it actually does. We’re not talking Snowpiercer levels of intelligence, but it’s far less aggressively stupid than, say,…
Philip Seymour Hoffman is an island of rumpled calm in Anton Corbijn’s urgent A Most Wanted Man, a glum-out-of-principle espionage story based on a John Le Carré novel. The role demands that Hoffman be quiet, steady, and occasionally frustrated and that he hold secrets — often from us, which is…
Surely, at some point, they thought of casting Michael Cera. Richard Ayoade’s often marvelous The Double, an existential jest set in a bureaucratic dystopia so familiar and lightly comic that it may as well be Kafka Fantasy Camp, stars Jessie Eisenberg, the Oscar winner and future Lex Luthor, as a…
In A Wolf at the Door, Brazilian writer-director Fernando Coimbra turns a Lifetime Movie–worthy story of a doomed love triangle into a gripping neo-noir by empathizing equally with his three love-addled protagonists. Coimbra doesn’t go out of his way to sensationalize the events that lead naive Rosa (Leandra Leal) to…
With his stately drawl, Morgan Freeman has narrated nonfiction documentaries about penguins, slavery, the lemurs of Madagascar, ancient Egyptian pharaohs, and the expansion of the universe. His is a voice of authority tempered by warmth and wisdom, capable of evoking felt human experience and the majesty of creation. In writer-director…
Sirens blare and an eerie voice announces it’s best to remain indoors if you don’t plan to participate. While others make safety arrangements and some sharpen their knives, one man loads his steel-armored black car with plenty of guns and begins cruising. Fires erupt along the street, and gunshots and…
Plays adapted into movies always feel naked by the time they make it to the screen, their theatrical bones showing through in a most awkward and unbecoming way. That’s more or less true of Roman Polanski’s screen version of David Ives’ Venus in Fur, in which a playwright and first-time…
