If you recently had a close encounter with the howling demon known as Hurricane Sandy, you might have a renewed belief in global warming. If not, consider yourself lucky, then see Chasing Ice, director Jeff Orlowski’s beautiful yet sobering documentary about the world’s rapidly melting ice caps. His guide is…
Joe Wright’s dust-blowing new adaptation of Anna Karenina faces a towering mountain of precedent: not only the greatest novel by the man Nabokov called “the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction” but the whole checkered history of Leo Tolstoy at the movies. A visit to Tolstoy’s imdb.com page gives the…
An adaptation of George V. Higgins’s 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade, Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly anatomizes a self-policing underground economy of junkies, killers, and administrators to indict a present-day mainstream world by suggesting that the criminal satellite economy and the “straight” superstructure are functionally the same. It’s a movie that…
The Loneliest Planet begins with a close-up shot of a beautiful woman, naked and trembling. It’s not what it sounds like. Nica (Hani Furstenberg), on a premarriage honeymoon with fiancé Alex (Gael García Bernal) in rural Georgia, is in the midst of a makeshift shower. As Nica pogoes up and…
An empathic, absorbing tale of the old and the beautiful, Starlet tracks an unlikely intergenerational friendship in the San Fernando Valley. Florida transplant Jane (Dree Hemingway) is employed by one of the area’s main engines of commerce, breaking into the XXX industry and cheerfully working adult-movie trade shows. When not…
A stacked-deck theological inquiry filtered through a Titanic-by-way-of-Slumdog Millionaire narrative, Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals but otherwise sinks like a stone. It’s no shock that Ang Lee brings to his high-seas adventure graceful and refined aesthetics devoid of any unique signature or pressing emotion,…
America has had its national traumas — its Antietams and Pearl Harbors and 9/11s — but what we haven’t faced since the Battle of New Orleans is proper ground invasion, a shooting war with a foreign occupying army. Rather than accept this as good fortune, the absence of this test…
Early in Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins with a sack of fat connecting chin to neck) walks the red carpet at the premiere of his 1959 chase film, North by Northwest. “You’re 60 years old!” shouts a reporter. The scene is an announcement that Hitchcock will be…
If you completely unpack the plot of Peter Ramsey’s sweet, fun Rise of the Guardians, it’s a hierarchical set of nested lies: A bunch of sprite-like beings who, in real life, we’ve fabricated to trick children, are, for movie purposes, actually real. But they will vanish in puffs of rationality…
There’s an unfun tendency in American life to fictionalize our national heroes as rigid statue people who speak only as though they are delivering commencement addresses, a kind of unlovable, Al Gore-ish anti-charisma that would inhibit anyone in real life from becoming a national hero in the first place. Own…
That the American cinema is deader than Dillinger is a fact no right-thinking observer unwilling to be laughed out of the room would even think of denying today. To do the current round of think piece writers one better, we will add that not only are the movies dead, but…
Silver Linings Playbook, which stars Bradley Cooper as a manic-depressive man-child attempting to get his life back together after a breakdown, won the coveted Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and subsequently shot to the top of most Oscar prognosticators’ Best Picture short list. The film’s…
Google “Danzig shopping for cat supplies” and you’ll find links to phone-cam shots of former Misfits singer Glenn Danzig crossing a grocery-store parking lot while wearing a Danzig T-shirt and carrying Fresh Step. The shots are humbling and humanizing. In scenes perhaps inspired by those photos, retired musician Cheyenne (Sean…
Fifty years in, the spy is ever less relevant — and still beloved. Why? Attention, Eon Productions, Daniel Craig, and Heineken: James Bond is not a beer drinker! Sure, I know. Getting all worked up about the new James Bond installment is like freaking out about a new Tim Burton…
Sean Baker’s Starlet stars Dree Hemingway (Ernest’s great-granddaughter) as Jane, a 21-year-old “girl next door” porn performer whose off-hours are spent getting high in the Valley house she shares with fellow “starlet” Melissa (Stella Maeve) and Melissa’s small-time impresario boyfriend (James Ransone). The story in the movie, which screens at…
Woody Allen has been known to suggest that, in directing a good movie, much of the battle lies in casting. Were that entirely true, A Late Quartet — starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, and Christopher Walken — would be phenomenal. As it is, the film about a New York…
“You were really and truly inside me,” Helen Hunt’s sex surrogate, Cheryl, assures her client, 36-year-old Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes), a poet and journalist confined to an iron lung after contracting polio as a child, who doesn’t want to die a virgin. Similarly, The Sessions, written and directed by Ben…
When Daniel Craig confidently strides into the hotel room at the Mandarin Oriental Miami to meet with us, he is wearing a perfectly tailored suit with a pocket square, not unlike James Bond’s attire in Skyfall, the latest installment opening this Friday. He adjusts his watchband in a way that…
If Hollywood’s rut du jour is the origin story as bid for franchise immortality, you can’t say that Skyfall — the 23rd “official” James Bond film in 50 years — isn’t on trend. Eight years ago in Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s first outing as Bond, we learned that 007 owes…
Raconteuse, epigrammatist, and mythomaniac, peerless fashion editor Diana Vreeland (1903 – 89) might have loved words as much as she loved Balenciaga. As Harold Koda of the Met’s Costume Institute, for which Vreeland served as a special consultant from 1973 until her death, memorably says in this often-charming nonfiction bauble,…
The 27th-annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival wraps up November 11 with its awards party at 7:30 p.m. at the Copacabana Supper Club in Fort Lauderdale. Over the past few weeks, local film fanatics have taken in about 200 foreign, documentary, short, and indie films. For this last full week…
The yammering about “Oscar gold” and Denzel Washington’s potential three-peat will soon reach a deafening pitch, but such noise can only embarrass a fine character study like Flight, whose prevailing tone is a heavy, elemental melancholy. The mood is there from the opening pan across the Orlando airport under gray,…
