When he died in December 2011, Kim Jong Il left behind more than a dynastic regime and a closet full of drab pantsuits. Jong Il, who ruled the hermetic North Korea from his father Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 until his own passing 17 years later, was a noted…
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to watch Jacques Audiard’s outrageous melodrama Rust and Bone without laughing. Loosely adapted from two works in Craig Davidson’s 2005 short-story collection of the same name, Rust and Bone finds Audiard returning to the overdetermined characters and swift redemption…
“Just so you know, it’s going to take a while,” says the CIA officer to his newly arrived colleague at the start of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. The year is 2003, the place a secret prison (or “black site”) somewhere in the deserts of the Middle East or Asia,…
Most of the blathering last year about the death of film and film culture has already evaporated from the mind, like so much inert gas. But one gnomic pronouncement endures: Leos Carax describing cinema as “a beautiful island with a cemetery” following the world premiere of Holy Motors at Cannes…
When the words true story appear twice in a film’s opening disclaimer, it’s a guarantee that what follows will include at least one questionable fiction. The Impossible is inspired by the Alvarez Belons, a Spanish family of five who survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed almost 300,000 lives;…
David Chase looks like he wants to whack somebody. Not just anybody, mind you, but the middle-age guy with the bad dye job a few tables away from us in the Library Bar of the Regency Hotel. “Hiya!” bellows the dye job into his phone. “I’m sittin’ here watchin’ the…
“Like a lot of other stuff in my life, I sort of fell backwards into it,” screenwriter Will Beall says of his unexpected perch atop Hollywood’s A-list. Unexpected, because just five years ago Beall was busy working for Tinseltown’s second most famous employer, the Los Angeles Police Department, where he…
There’s traffic from Silver Lake. That’s why Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund, the stars of On the Road, are late to the Benedict Room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. We’re as psychically far from Jack Kerouac’s Beat gospel as you can get: fidgeting under crystal chandeliers in…
Perhaps in response to bombastic mainstream Hollywood, international auteurs often veer toward minimalism — quieter emotions, slower tempos, a tightly defined era and setting. Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes is clearly a man of the art house — his new film, Tabu, which opens this week, was shot on 16mm black-and-white…
Ah, here it is again: that special time we experience every two to six years when Quentin Tarantino makes a new movie, and people dig out the old “Tarantino just steals everything from such-and-such” arguments. You’ve heard them. Reservoir Dogs is a scene-for-scene rip-off of Ringo Lam’s City on Fire,…
You can hear the people sing — really hear them — in the long-gestating screen version of that Broadway juggernaut Les Misérables. Countering the standard practice of having the actors in a film musical lip-synch their songs to prerecorded tracks, director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) insisted that all of…
Salesmen are typically depicted in screen drama as the quintessential American phonies. The exceptions — in Barry Levinson’s Avalon or Whit Stillman’s Barcelona — are buried under a mountain of films proving the rule. That one set of phonies are being dramatically indicted by actors is an irony that we…
Quentin Tarantino has been Googling himself, and it’s starting to become a problem. The filmmaker, whose eighth feature, Django Unchained, opens on Christmas Day, is famously an analog evangelist: He writes his scripts in longhand; he bans cellphones from his sets, and hasn’t had one of his own in years;…
Sadly, country songwriters stand as nearly the only entertainers in our popular culture who craft memorable art on the subject of marriage, the state in which just less than half of Americans spend the majority of their lives. A few years ago, Brad Paisley, one of Nashville’s best, wrote and…
In his 2005 novel One Shot, writer Lee Child lays out nine rules for surviving a five-against-one alley fight, a challenge his hero, the ex-Army cop Jack Reacher, is about to face. These include “Be on your feet and ready.” “Identify the ringleader.” “Don’t break the furniture.” Rule number nine…
Emotionally and psychologically textured melodrama suffers under the weight of its source material in The Eye of the Storm, Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of Australian Nobel Prize winner Patrick White’s 1973 novel. Schepisi’s direction has a measured stateliness that, in conjunction with Kate Williams’ graceful editing, lends quiet, dreamy intensity to…
In Anne Fletcher’s buddy comedy The Guilt Trip, Seth Rogen is Andy Brewster, an organic chemist frustrated in his entrepreneurial efforts at selling the natural cleaning product he has invented. About to embark on a multicity sales jaunt, he invites his mom (Barbra Streisand) along, ostensibly to spend time with…
Watching Django Unchained, it’s easy to imagine that Quentin Tarantino had such a blast making his last picture, the ebullient Holocaust fantasia Inglourious Basterds, that he decided to take his whole blood-spattered historical tent show on the road, this time putting down stakes in antebellum Dixieland. Although not technically a…
Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” Is Self-Conscious Monument Art
“The Fitzgerald Family Christmas” Review
Part of the renascent body-count action industry, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning might shock many Americans with its mere existence. “There are four Universal Soldier movies?” those shocked Americans would say. They might also be taken aback by the bracing violence that marks the film from stem to stern: the…
“You’re as free as the wind,” says Paul Exben (Romain Duris) to the son of a legal client to whom he has offered the choice of drug rehab or disinheritance from the family’s fortune. Oh, irony. Paul is himself encumbered with a career he hates and a family he suspects…
