The new film from Spanish writer/director Pablo Berger is a silent, black-and-white film so witty, riveting, and drop-dead gorgeous that moviegoers may forget to notice that they can’t hear the dialogue. Astutely, Berger has chosen to wrap his experiment around a tale everyone knows: the perils of that sweet beauty,…
Rama Burshtein’s Fill the Void opens on green leaves, smiling faces, lush billows of fabric that when pieced together, the sensuous images accumulating into a fuller picture, become a wedding dress, tulle and silk diffusing the glow. Engagements, weddings, births, and deaths: This film is a more traditional kind of…
It’s to the great detriment of The Kings of Summer that it follows the identically premised Mud by just weeks. Both films tell bittersweet coming-of-age stories about teenage friends who learn how to become men in a soon-to-be-corrupted Eden, and both are questionably embellished by a predictable teen romance, an…
In World War Z, All That Matters Is Brad Pitt
Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is a movie event with an actual movie inside, crying to get out. Despite its preposterous self-seriousness, its overblown, CGI’ed-to-death climax, and its desperate efforts to depict the destruction of, well, everything on Earth, there’s greatness in this retelling of the origin of Superman; moments…
You’ll witness no border-crossing histrionics in writer-director Antonio Méndez Esparza’s first feature, which translates as “Here and There”; the film is as simple, straightforward, and elegant as its title. Featuring a cast of nonprofessionals — many playing versions of themselves and all naturals in front of the camera — Aquí…
It’s time, apparently, for the aging ghosts of ’60s radicalism to once again take stock of their sins and compromises. Once it gets its walkers moving, Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep nearly plays like a green-granola-lefty counterpart to The Expendables, a Hollywood Elderhostel reunion crowded with septuagenarian icons looking…
Here’s a category idea for bar trivia: Collect one-sentence plot summaries of young-adult novel series and R-rated horror films, and see who can distinguish which from which. The one in which the kids kill each other for sport is approved by school districts for extra-credit reading, as is the one…
Ask people about their favorite movies and the same titles come up regularly — Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane. But some films have special meaning for people even if they don’t turn up on lists of established favorites. For many people, particularly those who were in their 20s…
“A great singer, chandeliers, champagne, and costumes — we see this at a distance,” Jean-François Sivadier says deep into Becoming Traviata, a spare and ravishing documentary that positions viewers in the rehearsal room in the weeks leading up to his minimalist production of Verdi’s La Traviata. Sivadier is encouraging his…
The chronic artistic (and, ironically, political) failure of much mainstream American queer cinema is its earnest, facile treatment of the issues affecting the LGBT community. Director Glenn Gaylord, working from a script by David W. Ross, falls into the usual traps in this film about marriage equality and immigration, and…
A big winner at last year’s SXSW, this palm-sized Bronx indie about a couple of graffiti bombers aiming to gain fame by tagging the Mets’ Home Run Apple runs on nothing but biodiesel personality. Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington) are mates only in spraying, and they work a…
Superman is an idea. OK, fine. Technically he’s an intellectual property—a set of data points slammed together by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the 1930s, sold for $130 to National Allied Publications (later DC Comics/TimeWarner), and subsequently transformed into a nugget of multivariously exploitable content that has netted entertainment…
New York is a cruel and beautiful place, just as 27 is a cruel and beautiful age. In Frances Ha, Greta Gerwig plays a woman who’s feeling the weight of both. Frances is an aspiring dancer who has reached the age when “aspiring” really means not cutting it. Life with…
After completing five months of principal photography on The Avengers, Joss Whedon flew back to Los Angeles and threw himself a welcome-home party. As the guests circled his pool, he asked friends such as Firefly’s Nathan Fillion, Angel’s Amy Acker, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Alexis Denisof if they were…
Would you sign on for three months in shark-infested waters on a tippy raft under a captain who can’t swim? The shrewdest joke in the sure-fire Kon-Tiki — a film about Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,000-mile South Pacific expedition to prove that ocean-faring Incans could have settled Tahiti — is that practically…
Some things are charming about European films that ape Hollywood, the same way that seeing yourself reflected through a fun-house mirror can be. The sentiments aren’t quite as saccharine. The obnoxious characters are a touch nastier. Some subplots aren’t tidily resolved. Yet despite those deviations, the gist is essentially the…
Olivier Assayas’ gorgeous, freewheeling, semiautobiographical Something in the Air is an ode to both youth’s universal qualities and the specifics of Assayas’ youth in particular. The picture opens in the suburbs just outside Paris in 1971, among a group of teenaged students still energized by the explosive student and worker…
Spend some time among a gallery of noble busts depicting Roman Senators, and familiar faces begin to emerge among the ancient marble: The mechanic, an uncle, a politician from TV . . . and the racketeer from the newspaper. It’s this last correlation which concerns Caesar Must Die. Paolo and…
“Least you got to see a motherfucker crucify himself,” Richard Pryor spits in the most surprising footage director Marina Zenovich has unearthed for her new documentary Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic. The scene is of Pryor’s last great cock-up just before his last, great comeback. Pacing restlessly before a Hollywood…
The unlikeliest of all the Hangover trilogy’s comic implausibilities might be its four pampered, rich-boy leads unironically calling themselves the “Wolf Pack” without anybody ever making fun of them. In the slobs-versus-snobs comedies of the 1970s and ’80s, the snooty rich kids were always the antagonists, bullying the nerds and…
In Renoir, a languorous look at the last days of the storied painter, we get a view of the artist at odds with a blue-haired lady’s notion of her favorite impressionist. It’s a pivotal moment of Renoir family history, with father and son both taking creative and sexual inspiration from…
