One miserable couple collides with another in the cringe comedy Happy, Happy, a prizewinner at Sundance and Norway’s official submission for the foreign-language-film Oscar. Kaja (Agnes Kittelsen), a chipper teacher of German and “arts and crafts” at a local junior high, lives to please her disengaged closet-case husband, Eirik (Joachim…
The morality of the mad-scientist tale has remained more or less fixed since the beginning of sound cinema: From Dr. Frankenstein’s hubristic claim to “know what it feels like to be God” to Jurassic Park’s criticism of “scientists [who] were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop…
A revenge of the have-nots playing on the clear class stratification of the luxury high-rise, Tower Heist pits lobby against penthouse. Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) is the manager of the Tower, an exclusive apartment building on Columbus Circle (the Trump International, in fact). Josh’s job is to know every peccadillo…
The Double, Michael Brandt’s post-Cold War spy film, is grade-B hokum, but it’s not without its occasional generic thrills. Apparently more adept at staging individual set pieces than he is at building tension, creating believable characters, or stringing together a coherent narrative, Brandt places his best sequence, a successful jailbreak…
For his third film, outer-borough sensationalist Dito Montiel sets most of the action in Astoria, the Queens neighborhood that dominated his first, 2006’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. He reteams with Channing Tatum, the star of all his features, here playing Jonathan White, a second-generation cop tormented by the…
The doobie brothers are back, though wildly diverging lifestyle choices have left the best bud-loving buds all but estranged. Harold (John Cho) continues his ascent at his Wall Street firm, returning each night to his suburban nest, where wife Maria (Paula Garcés) greets him with a demand for baby-making sex…
Standing outside his small-town Ohio home, his wife and child busy preparing breakfast inside, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) looks up at the ominous, slate-gray sky in the first scene of Take Shelter. The clouds open, raining down oily, piss-colored droplets. It’s end-of-days weather, a phenomenon that only Curtis seems to…
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is the close-second candidate to be attributed authorship of the 37 plays of William Shakespeare — who, due to the troublesome existence of evidence, remains the general favorite. De Vere, played as a figure of regal isolation by Rhys Ifans, is the protagonist…
Sure to be drowned out by the drum circles at the Occupy protests, writer/director J.C. Chandor’s lifeless Margin Call depicts roughly 36 hours at an unnamed Manhattan investment firm at the dawn of the 2008 financial freak-out. Chandor’s debut feature audaciously asks us to empathize with obscenely overpaid risk analysts…
Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, The Rum Diary adapts a novel Hunter S. Thompson began in the early ’60s and published, under Johnny Depp’s auspices, more than three decades later. A first-person account of the drinking life on a tropical isle in the late 1950s, its protagonists are mainly…
In 2009, Oren Peli’s low-budget, “found-footage” thriller Paranormal Activity came out of nowhere to gross more than $100 million domestically at the box office. Not bad for a first-time filmmaker who made a $15,000 movie in his house in San Diego with two friends and sold it to Paramount for…
Joseph Dorman’s Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness is a film-essay-cum-biodoc on author Solomon Rabinovich (1859-1916), who, taking as his pen name the Yiddish greeting Sholem Aleichem (“Peace be with you”), was at once popular writer, literary artist, and Jewish culture hero. Laughing in the Darkness opens with the inevitable…
In heavily outlining the tragedies and injustices that befell the musically gifted older sister of Wolfgang “Amadeus,” writer/director René Féret underplays the most interesting elements in this story of Maria Anna “Nannerl” Mozart. Forced by their father to tour under hellish circumstances, young Wolfgang and Nannerl traverse Europe year-round, performing…
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…
In hindsight, the 1984 hit Footloose — starring Kevin Bacon and directed by Herbert Ross — along with its contemporary Flashdance can be seen as the link between the old Hollywood model of a let’s-put-on-a-show musical, based on original songs brought to life in elaborate choreographed numbers, and the later…
The Way might lack the Chicken Soup for the Soul imprimatur, but writer/director Emilio Estevez’s travelogue tale of fathers and sons (starring his own dad, Martin Sheen) trades in a kindred brand of warm, soothing uplift that viewers might read as insight into the Sheen family saga; we did not…
Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is a two-bit trainer traveling the state fair circuit in a not-too-distant future. His line is robot fighting, a sport that has absorbed the audience for boxing, MMA, and, apparently, demolition derby. After a tough match leaves Charlie ‘botless, he gets news that his ex-girlfriend, with…
Based on the true story of Sam Childers — an ex-con, druggie, gun nut, and self-described “hillbilly from Pennsylvania” who got right with the Lord and built an orphanage for Sudanese refugees — Machine Gun Preacher is the umpteenth onscreen iteration of a white savior aiding the most desperate in…
A single scene captures the tricky tonal balance of Jonathan Levine’s cancer comedy 50/50. Adam, the straightedge radio producer played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, has just finished his first round of chemotherapy. It was tough, but the kindly gents IV’d next to him (Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer) made it…
No one grieves onscreen quite like Charlotte Gainsbourg, here playing Dawn, made a widow within the first ten minutes of The Tree. When not sobbing or sleeping, she expends her depleted energy wrangling her four kids, ranging from toddler to teenager, who scamper around their stilt-built house in Boonah, a…
Of this year’s corny family heartwarmers based on true aquatic stories of coping with the loss of appendages, director Charles Martin Smith’s boy-and-his-dolphin melodrama at least earns your empathy — unlike the disingenuous Christploitation of Soul Surfer. Off the Florida coast, skittish grade-schooler Nelson (Nathan Gamble) strikes an immediate bond…
At the time of this writing, the Oakland Athletics sit at a distant third in the American League West, 18 games behind the Texas Rangers, managed by Ron Washington, once the first-base coach under A’s wonderboy Billy Beane. The A’s have not had a winning season since making the playoffs…
