One of the biggest names in Formula 1 racing, Ayrton Senna was 34 years old when a well-placed blow from a suspension shaft ended his life on Tamburello curve at the San Marino Grand Prix in Imola, Italy. Asif Kapadia’s expertly orchestrated documentary/biography condenses the breakneck decade leading up to…
Le Havre is something of a comeback for Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki. His warmhearted comedy of underdog working-class solidarity is made with a mixed Finnish-French-Senegalese cast in the French port city Le Havre. The French setting seems to have leavened director Kaurismäki’s morose humor. Le Havre (which means “the haven”…
This documentary on Kevin Clash — the kind, gentle man who created the Muppet beloved by every single child in the world — rushes through intriguing points its interviewees bring up to devote more time to banalities. Instead of hearing more from the colleague who exhorted Clash, “Jim [Henson] doesn’t…
My Reincarnation was in production for more than 20 years, beginning when acne-plagued teenager Yeshi Silvano Namkhai learned that he’d been dubbed the reincarnation of a famous Tibetan yogi. The judgment was passed down by his world-famous Tibetan spiritual-leader dad, Rinpoche Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, and director Jennifer Fox wastes no…
Mayans might have predicted the end of the world in 2012, but could they have known that the countdown to eternal hellfire would begin with the multigenerational-celebrity-glutted New Year’s Eve? New York City serves as the metropolis flattened by dull location shots and ethnic caricatures: Sofía Vergara, playing a sous…
This gentle, Bambi-level-sad documentary is about an orphaned killer whale named Luna who never harmed anybody and only wanted to be loved. Separated from his pod near Vancouver Island, Canada, he begged for human contact and play, posed for photographs, nuzzled boats, frolicked with logs and buoys, allowed children to…
Big, soft, squishy: These words describe Jonah Hill’s heart as well as his body in The Sitter, the mixed-bag last record of its star’s physique before a radical slim-down. As the film opens, Hill’s layabout Noah, kicked out of college and living at home in the suburbs of New York…
An egalitarian study of crime and punishment in a small Southern town, Into the Abyss is also an unmistakably Herzogian inquiry into the lawlessness of the human soul. That would be the abyss of the title, though if you’re looking for more of that kind of shameless lyrical swagger, you…
Panicked over being late to artificially inseminate his wife at the hospital, an unhappily married therapist (Dane Cook) pulls his mistress’ mouth off his cock and forces her to spit into a plastic donation cup. So begins this wretchedly unearned provocation of a drama, in which cowriter/director Matthew Leutwyler rips…
The pleasing sounds of Carmen Maura’s whispery Castilian lisp open this 1962-set film about the friendship between a Parisian captain of industry and a group of Spanish maids. But all the words that follow assault the ear in this unnecessary rehashing of the earthy virtues of low-paid laborers versus the…
The first thing you see in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is a tight close-up of Kirsten Dunst’s face. Behind her, slow as molasses, birds are dropping from the sky. Brueghel’s The Flight of Icarus turns leisurely to ash; a passage from Tristan und Isolde swells on the soundtrack as lightning…
The Descendants is a case of bad things happening to good people. Honolulu lawyer Matt King (George Clooney), prosperous scion of a Hawaiian family claiming descent from American missionaries and Polynesian royalty, is humbled by a flurry of body blows. “Paradise can go fuck itself,” he declares in voice-over. A…
Desperately trying to appeal to not just the Gen X’ers who grew up with Kermit but also to the tykes who’ve never even heard of Jim Henson, The Muppets has none of the easy confidence of the original TV show or movie. The reboot is largely the labor of love…
The animated, 3-D Arthur Christmas introduces three generations of St. Nick’s family: Weedy retired Grandsanta (voiced by Bill Nighy, hogging the good lines), the obliviously ineffectual Santa Claus (Jim Broadbent), and his two sons, the North Pole’s ultracompetent control-room manager and Santa’s expected successor, Steve (Hugh Laurie), and his brother,…
In the TV-movie-quality impersonation that is Simon Curtis’ My Week With Marilyn, Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) has arrived in 1956 London to star in The Prince and the Showgirl, directed by and costarring Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh). The pill-addled peroxide blond sweeps onto Olivier’s set with an entourage and habitually…
Martin Scorsese’s first foray into 3-D family filmmaking centers on its title character, played by Asa Butterfield, a just-prepubescent orphan squatting in a train station circa 1930. When not dodging an orphan-hunting station constable (Sacha Baron Cohen), Hugo secretly maintains the station’s clocks and attempts to fix an automaton, the…
“The revolution will not be televised.” So Gil Scott-Heron asserted in 1970. In the case of Bobby Fischer, though, the revolution was televised. Considered by many to be the greatest chess player who ever lived and certainly the most celebrated, Fischer (1943 – 2008) first entered America’s teleconsciousness as a…
Mumble, the hoofing emperor penguin from the first Happy Feet (voiced again by Elijah Wood), now struggles to make a fatherly impression on his own chick, Erik, who has instead found his role model in a mysterious beaked penguin, Sven (Hank Azaria, doing burlesque Swede), who has become a messianic…
The single advantage the awful Twilight movies have over Stephenie Meyer’s awful-but-gripping novels is that, unlike the books’ sad sack, movie Bella Swan is a spiky, populist heroine. On film, Kristen Stewart beautifully underplays (or, for all I know, overplays to the absolute peak of her abilities) Bella’s deadpan ordinariness,…
Clint Eastwood goes deep into Oliver Stone territory and emerges victorious with J. Edgar. Although hardly flawless, Eastwood’s biopic is his richest, most ambitious movie since the Letters From Iwo Jima/Flags of Our Fathers duo, if not Unforgiven. Does anyone under age 50 even remember the man who more or…
As taut and economical as its title is unwieldy, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene — a first feature that won the Best Director award last January at Sundance — is a deft, old-school psychological thriller (or perhaps horror film) that relies mainly on the power of suggestion and memories…
After 20 years together, 40-ish arts professionals Hanna (Sophie Rois) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper) have succumbed to bed death. Other stresses burden the relationship: the passing of Simon’s mother, his diagnosis of testicular cancer soon after, the insistence of writer/director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, The International) on constantly using…
