Holocaust culture has proven to be essentially infinite — it’s almost 70 years since the end of World War II, and untold stories of decimation and survival are still hitting the mainstream. Agnieszka Holland’s new film, In Darkness, opens a scab perhaps familiar only to Holocaust Museum devotees — the…
In Silent House, a college-aged young woman, Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), is on break and helping her father (Adam Trese) and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens) renovate the remote, no-cell-phone-reception lake house where they once vacationed as a family. Then Uncle storms off after a round of fraternal bickering, Dad disappears with…
With expectations to match its obscenely huge budget (an estimated quarter of a billion dollars), this long-delayed adaptation of pulp meister Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1917 sci-fi swashbuckler A Princess of Mars has every right to be a bloated, gutless CGI eyesore. What a surprise, then, that John Carter—leaden title and…
A Separation is an urgently shot courtroom drama designed to put you in the jury box. Dispensing with preliminaries, it opens at a judicial hearing where, both facing the camera that stands in for the judge, a quarrelsome husband and wife each make their case. Both are middle-class members of…
“There’s no one way to live our lives,” hopes the displaced, adrift couple at the center of Wanderlust. Shopping between the prefab identity options available to them — squeezed, stressed urban professionalism; suburban McMansion soul death; rural counterculture opting out — George and Linda (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) are…
The gorgeously scruffy Juliette (director/cowriter Valérie Donzelli) and Roméo (cowriter Jérémie Elkaïm) — yes, the improbability is noted — move from dive-bar love-at-first-sight to proud parents of a newborn boy in the first few minutes of Declaration of War. Then their 18-month-old son, Adam, is diagnosed with a brain tumor…
Hostilities in This Means War are declared as two work mates compete for the affection of the same woman. The contested objective is Lauren (Reese Witherspoon), a product tester who decides to apply comparative shopping techniques to dating. Her would-be beaus, FDR (Chris Pine) and Tuck (Tom Hardy), are best…
Soulfulness radiates through The Secret World of Arrietty, a hand-drawn adaptation of Mary Norton’s ageless kid-lit series The Borrowers, about four-inch-high humanoids who live beneath the floorboards of those dangerous “human beans.” Fourteen years old and literally knee-high to a kitty cat, inquisitive emblem of purity Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit…
Working the long con and damned near getting away with it, this kissing cousin to Fargo makes for a surprisingly entertaining February time-passer. Greg Kinnear steps out of incredulous do-gooding sad-sack mode to play Mickey Prohaska, an independent insurance agent, low-level sociopath, and burgeoning grand larcenist. Thanks to a helpful…
Every year, you enter your office’s Oscar pool and carefully select the major categories while haphazardly guessing the minor ones (Animated Short, Makeup). Every year, you lose. Why? Because you’ve got it backward: Oscar pools are always decided on the margins, where information is sketchier and outcomes are harder to…
In We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tilda Swinton lives out an urban bohemian’s worst nightmare. Forced to give up her independence (and downtown loft) when a reckless night with schlubby photographer flame Franklin (John C. Reilly) results in accidental pregnancy, free-spirit travel writer Eva becomes an unhappy housewife in…
The Conquest is a brisk, fascinating chronicle of Nicolas Sarkozy. It time-shifts from May 6, 2007— the day he was both elected president of France and left by his second wife, Cécilia, for good — to the five years leading up to his victory. It’s all pre-Carla Bruni and illuminates…
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island continues the weak Jules Verne-inspired adventures of 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. The production design appears inspired by Yes album covers and Candy Land. Of the original cast and major crew, only Josh Hutcherson, as Sean, a sulky teenaged Vernian, returns. Sean…
The Vow, a full-bodied lunge for the heartstrings, has a humdinger of a premise, forcing its characters to face a question that most of us ask ourselves: If you could do the last five years over again, would you live them the same, or take a mulligan? A young, married…
There’s no question that the 2012 edition of the Sundance Film Festival was stuffed with films in some way touched by the psychological and practical fallout of economic crisis. It was blatant in documentaries such as Lauren Greenfield’s Queen of Versailles, in which a nouveau riche time-share mogul’s gaudy lifestyle…
This film follows two parallel story lines: one featuring a thoroughly insufferable little girl, the other a pleasingly grumpy middle-aged widow. Scrawny, bespectacled, precocious 11-year-old Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic), disgusted by the futility of her bourgeois existence, plans to kill herself on her next birthday — a scheme announced, as…
Written by Max “Son of John” Landis, Chronicle playfully transcends its “Cloverfield meets Heroes” pitch. Brimming with passive anger over his mother’s terminal illness and his father’s drunken abuse, Seattle loner Andrew (Dane DeHaan) buys a cheap camcorder and records every banal whim with his cousin Matt (Alex Russell). Andrew…
The hero of the red-herring heist flick Man on a Ledge draws two reactions from the Manhattan throng beneath his 21st-floor perch on a midtown hotel. The first, of course, is the predictable “just get it over with” impatience of New Yorkers impeded by police barricades. The second is unlikely…
Fulfilling a mission that has consumed her for almost two decades, Glenn Close — as producer, cowriter, and lead — brings to the screen the titular character, a woman who passes as a man in 1890s Ireland. The result of this passion project? Getting to look like Bruce Jenner in…
If you crash Liam Neeson and six disposable buddies in the frozen Alaskan wilderness, there is the expectation — nay, the requirement — that Neeson punch as many wolves as possible. Tape pocketknives and broken glass to your fists, improvise other weapons from the plane wreckage — just do what’s…
As bluntly humanist and free-ranging as its subject, this brisk take on the life of poet, sociologist, educator, psychologist, and general pain-in-the-ass gadfly Paul Goodman is as much endangered-species doc as biography. Goodman may be the most influential 20th-century thinker you’ve probably never heard of — good luck tracking down…
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close not only has serious lit pedigree, based as it is on the sophomore novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, but also two global-historical tragedies to play with. Ten-year old Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) has lost his father (Tom Hanks), who was on the 105th floor of…
