Those were trying times for Rome. Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian Caesars and a big spender with a reputedly homicidal temper, was on the throne. Stories abound of how he attempted to poison his mother, kicked one of his wives to death, and personally ordered the upside-down crucifixion of…
Speaking in a Transylvanian accent with a touch of Borscht Belt, this latest Count Dracula is introduced in an 1895-set prologue while serenading his infant daughter. He has sworn off human blood, desires nothing more than a spot hidden away from ever-ready-to-mob villagers, and his baby-voiced, Weekend Update croon IDs…
After a nationally televised improv exercise that, for better or worse, offered more unvarnished reality than anything else at this year’s political conventions, Clint Eastwood returns in his first onscreen role in four years with Trouble With the Curve. The “empty chair” jokes practically make themselves. There is a scene…
Typically, the creators of comic-book adaptations assume that ingratiating themselves to anyone unfamiliar with their characters/properties demands boilerplate origin stories where protagonists exhaustively declare who they are in no uncertain terms. This is, thankfully, not true of Dredd, whose creators have the confidence to treat their narrative like just another…
The new, semi-gritty indie About Cherry is all about a semi-reluctant slide into the porn industry, and it’s also the first mainstream feature co-written by a busy porn actress, Lorelei Lee, otherwise famous for double penetrations and clothespin bondage. This shouldn’t strike us very strange. Every screenwriter needs a day…
A critic’s report from a film festival like Toronto, where something like 300 features were unveiled from September 6 through 16, can be something like a Rorschach test—or, at least, it can be something like the Rorschach test depicted in Paul Thomas Anderson’s TIFF entry, The Master, in which Joaquin…
A rerelease whose cash-grab intentions are as transparent as the crystal-clear Sydney ocean, Finding Nemo 3-D exists only to relieve parents of money for a movie they undoubtedly already own. Disney’s double-dip of Andrew Stanton’s beloved 2003 adventure features absolutely no new content — save for the boisterous prefacing short…
Slick and grown-up as Richard Gere himself, this intricate fiscal thriller takes a dead bead on extreme privilege, with Gere’s Madoff-like billionaire fund-runner scrambling to keep his personal empire from crumbling like crackers. He has everything, including a loving family, a hot French girlfriend (Laetitia Casta), and that warm umber…
The big movie event of September will be the anticipated latest from a certain filmmaker who signs his films with the surname Anderson and a pair of initials, a prodigious talent who burst onto the scene with a stylish entry in the mid-’90s crime-thriller wave and never left. The master…
Weddings make such bitchin’ film scenarios because the stakes are believably high: If anything goes wrong, social opprobrium, the loss of your beloved, or both can ensue, right in front of your disdainful parents, the clergy, and probably Vince Vaughn or somebody. Directors have placed every obvious symbol of holy…
“I’ve made six movies, and I feel like I’m only just finally figuring out how this business fucking works,” Paul Thomas Anderson says on an unseasonably mild August afternoon in the Astoria section of Queens, where later tonight he will preview his latest film for an invited audience at the…
Screening the history of bootlegging in urban America led to the invention of a genre — the gangster film — but moviegoers have seen little of the hills and hollers from whence the syndicates’ potent spirits were shipped. Offhand, I can only think of Robert Mitchum’s homegrown 1958 vehicle Thunder…
The movie of choice this week for people who hold the beliefs that A) America is the strongest, best-est country that God ever virgin-birthed and B) that that nation somehow just isn’t strong enough to survive eight years of centrist Democratic leadership, Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016: Obama’s America actually does not…
You don’t always need to know the specific circumstances that precede the events of a postapocalyptic film, but the unexplained, history-ending catastrophe in Douglas Aarniokoski’s The Day precipitated some pretty contradictory conditions on the ground. Apparently, there is no food? Except that the film’s healthy-looking group of survivors trudges through…
A more hopeful reimagining of 2001’s portrait of man-machine relations, Robot & Frank envisions a near future in which automated servants aid the elderly in their twilight years. For retired cat burglar Frank (Frank Langella), memory loss is something to be denied, and the robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) with…
In Celeste and Jesse Forever, the titular, newly separated female protagonist’s unflamboyant gay coworker (Elijah Wood) tells her that “it’s time get your fuck on” and then immediately apologizes: “Sorry, I was trying to be your saucy gay friend.” Cowritten by and starring Parks and Rec straight-woman Rashida Jones, Forever…
In terms of looks, charisma, and talent, Rashida Jones should have been a star a long time ago. But in terms of what she’s ready to offer Hollywood (and what Hollywood finally might be ready to let her accomplish), her belated ascent seems well-timed. Bittersweet breakup comedy Celeste and Jesse…
Boyishly lean, with a brooding angularity that suggests both high maintenance and nefarious vacancy, Robert Pattinson has somehow filled the role of a grade-A male sex symbol without ever evincing anything like carnal energy, to top the Hollywood A list as a representative of the undead. Pattinson’s casting in Cosmopolis…
Remember how action movies used to be? The good old-fashioned American (but often European-accented) ones from the ’80s and ’90s, the type paid tribute to (but not necessarily re-created) in the Expendables movies? No offense to your Iron Men and your Jason Bournes, but I miss movies like Die Hard,…
David Koepp writes, and now directs, superior B-movies. This is an admirable and tough-to-master skill given how few major movie studios are willing to take chances on films with lower budgets that don’t employ a found-footage gimmick or generally look like they were made on an aglet-less shoestring budget. So…
Chinese artist, activist, and antagonist Ai Weiwei became a worldwide cause célèbre last April when he was arrested by authorities at the Beijing Airport, detained in an undisclosed location for nearly three months, and released after allegedly confessing to tax evasion. The Sundance-feted documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry concludes shortly…
For three months in 2010, Serbian-born performance artist Marina Abramovic sat in a chair in a gallery at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and directed her full, silent attention toward individual visitors seated across from her, seven hours a day, six days a week, without eating or drinking. Stillness…
