Is there something intrinsic to these wide-net, we’re-all-connected ensemble movies that makes their authors think they need to address every human conundrum? The vast, split-screen-slashed 360, directed by Fernando Meirelles from an overreaching screenplay by Frost/Nixon screenwriter Peter Morgan, is an alleged descendant of the granddaddy of social cross-section dramas,…
Calling back many of the same characters and more than a few of the same jokes, 2 Days in New York, Julie Delpy’s fourth film as writer-director, is a sequel to her 2007 2 Days in New York. A spinoff of sorts itself, Paris piggybacked on the popularity of 2004’s…
In anticipation of the remake of the 1976 girl-group melodrama I (which didn’t screen in time for our deadline)—Whitney Houston’s posthumous film appearance and her return to movies after a 15-year absence—we look back at the handful of celluloid performances by the woman once known as ” the Voice.” Houston’s…
“I’ll just tell you straight out, Killer Joe is the most disturbing film I’ve ever made,” William Friedkin admits. This is really something, coming from a filmmaker who has spent much of an eclectic career testing audience limits. The Exorcist riled Catholics and had theaters stocking barf bags in 1973;…
Like antidepressants, artificial sugars, Botox, and other miracle inventions of the past century, corporate culture became an omnipresent fact of life before anyone could know how it would affect the human body and brain on an extended timeline. One way to look at writer/director Craig Zobel’s second feature, Compliance—a pot-stirrer…
The Bourne films have more than just overstayed their welcome and outlasted the Ludlum books — they’ve been Van Halenized, with an abrupt change of frontman and a resulting dip in personality. The only big-ass popcorn franchise of the past decade to have not been spawned on computers, the series…
Although the tone of Steve Carell’s couples-counseling character in Hope Springs is consistently placid and even-handed, it’s also tellingly vague. Hope Springs might appear more contemplative than your average studio-produced rom-com, but that’s only because it’s atypically concerned with an older couple’s marriage problems. Dr. Feld’s (Carell) soothing advice sounds…
“My son is sick right now, covered in zits. It’s not contagious — I mean, it’s contagious, but don’t worry: Grown-ups don’t catch it. It’s called mouth-foot-and-butt disease or something.” Julie Delpy materializes on the patio of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont on a wave of nervous energy. Hair pinned up away…
Just because it made loads of money, stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, and features a three-titted mutant doesn’t mean Total Recall isn’t ruggedly individualistic art. Just look at its outsider pedigree: Total Recall was loosely based on a 1966 short story from the flushed mind of Philip K. Dick, produced by the…
Red Lights aspires to be a genre movie of ideas. Like a great number of films dealing with supernatural and extraterrestrial phenomena, it’s a thriller in which suspense depends on keeping both viewer and protagonist teetering, in the face of the unexplained, between rational agnosticism and faithful credulity. By the…
Michael Winterbottom is multitasking. In the past decade, he has made a dozen films, as varied as the Steve Coogan-as-Steve Coogan joints 24 Hour Party People and The Trip, the controversial Jim Thompson adaptation The Killer Inside Me, and two radically different assessments of the War on Terror, one an…
Christopher Nolan’s ponderous, pontifical action movies are written less as screenplays than as operator’s manuals, guiding an audience through assembling their important themes while scrupulously making sure you don’t miss a thing. This is as true of Inception, with its reams of expositional walk-through, as of Nolan’s superhero saga, now…
Sarah Polley’s second feature, much like her first, the superb Away From Her (2006), thoughtfully probes the pitfalls of coupledom and third-party threats. Five years into their marriage, Torontonians Margot (Michelle Williams) and Lou (Seth Rogen) have regressed fully into sexlessness, heat and mystery having been supplanted by baby-talking, bathroom…
Fans of Seth MacFarlane’s Fox mainstay Family Guy who wish he would run afoul of FCC regulations every week might be pleased with Ted, the story of a 35-year-old man and his foul-talking teddy bear. Plushies too might be turned on by the pot-smoking, whore-banging CGI toy ursus of the…
A sketchy trifle of French animation grabbing time in theaters thanks to its recent Oscar nomination, Felicioli and Gagnol’s barely hourlong film seeks shelf space beside Sylvain Chomet’s deft and rapturous hand-drawn cartoons (The Triplets of Belleville, The Illusionist), and the required self-conscious Frenchiness is spot-on. But the loose, all-pastel…
The Amazing Spider-Man, an inexcusably good reboot from director Marc Webb, celebrates the heartwarming arachno-genetic bar mitzvah in which a boy becomes a spider and a spider becomes a man, a rite of passage last observed in Sam Raimi’s uneven but often pretty great trilogy in the ’00s. And there’s…
Welcome to the recession, boys,” says John Travolta’s DEA-double-agent profiteer in Oliver Stone’s Savages, based on Don Winslow’s novel. Savages is a movie of its moment, though both its good guys and bad guys (if there’s really even a difference) are unquestionably the 1 percent of their industry — that…
When Channing Tatum stood up and revealed his bare ass to the camera a minute or two into Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike — which the actor conceived of and produced based on his own experience as a teenaged dancer in an all-male exotic revue — the audience in my screening…
Arguably the strangest of the many recent Scandinavian movies to rifle through modern American-indie tropes and then cash in by getting bought up for an American remake (see: Let the Right One In), Morten Tyldum’s ironic-violent farce focuses on the spirit of the Coen brothers’ catalog, from Blood Simple to…
People Like Us is a certifiable adult drama built atop sturdy thematic supports, a rare enough item these days. Sam (Chris Pine), a career-obsessed New York wheeler-dealer, is reeled back to hometown L.A. upon the death of his father, who had a multiplatinum record as a ’70s music producer/AR man…
It’s 1965, the rainy end of summer on the rocky coast of a fictional New England isle. Twelve-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman), a scrawny, bespectacled outcast with an unusual aptitude for cartography, disappears from the Khaki Scout camp, absconding with a couple of bedrolls and an air rifle and leaving behind…
With her high cheekbones, feline brown eyes, and heart-shaped mouth, actress Aubrey Plaza is bombshell-hot. But in an unusual twist for a 20-something performer at the beginning of her career, Plaza’s natural foxiness is a resource that has gone largely unexploited. Even when given a love-interest role (as in Judd…
