There may be nothing as Old Hollywood as the narrative about a pretty girl summoning up a dose of pluck to triumph over adversity. And yet Brit Marling — the lithe, stunning cowriter and star of 2011 Sundance Film Festival hits Another Earth and Sound of My Voice, who gives…
Danny McBride and Nick Swardson play Dwayne and Travis, a duo of going-nowhere types who, on the advice of a stripper, decide to off Dwayne’s hard-assed, Lotto-winning ex-Marine of a dad and live off the inheritance. They need $100,000 up-front for the hit man, so Dwayne and Travis elect to…
A uniquely Freudian entry in the body-switching comedy canon, The Change-Up stars Jason Bateman as standard-issue anal-retentive lawyer/family man Dave and Ryan Reynolds as Dave’s classically anal-expulsive stoner/playboy childhood friend Mitch. When sober, Dave begrudgingly tolerates Mitch’s wild-animal routine. One night, when both are drunk, Dave admits he’s secretly jealous…
Nina (Li Bingbing) is a Shanghai career girl who drops plans to move to New York when she learns her estranged bestie, Sophie (Gianna Jun), is in a coma. Soon Nina discovers the manuscript of a novel Sophie had been writing, which turns their long-term friendship (cemented as teens dancing…
So much petty drama has clouded the release of Michael Rapaport’s A Tribe Called Quest documentary. One version of the backstory casts the first-time director as a doofus actor wannabe who persuades the seminal but privately splintered hip-hop crew to participate in a consummate career doc. After two and a…
In the first scene of Crazy, Stupid, Love, Emily (Julianne Moore) tells Cal (Steve Carell), her high school sweetheart and husband of 20-plus years, that she wants a divorce. She goes on to mention that she had an affair with a coworker named Dave Lindhagen (Kevin Bacon), at which point…
Not every Homo sapiens who sees Project Nim will be moved to pledge membership in PETA. Still, this documentary biopic of the ’70s chimp picked to endure an “experiment” in simian sign language and general neglect pulls human heartstrings as wrenchingly as any creature feature in the 45 years since…
Exposing a little-known piece of Holocaust history — the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, in which French police arrested thousands of Jews in Paris in July 1942 — Sarah’s Key dutifully follows the template of scores of movies about the Shoah: wringing from atrocity the most unseemly sentimentality. The film toggles between…
Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics in 1941, Captain America was among the first American comic books intended as an explicit work of patriotic, political propaganda: The cover of the first edition, available months before Pearl Harbor, famously featured the titular costume hero punching out Adolf…
“Suburban malaise” they call it, and it’s the reason Long Island dental hygienist Laura (Jenna Fischer) self-soothes with afternoon Budweisers, jealously stews over her disparaging, workaholic husband (Chris O’Donnell), and lets her 12-year-old son (Daniel Yelsky) — a chubby ball of hormonal rage — walk all over her. An underdog…
After ten years, seven movies, six Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers, four directors, two dead parents, one grating house elf, and incalculable amounts of CG wizardry, pubescent growing pains, budding romances, and apocalyptic fire and brimstone, we’ve finally arrived: Bespectacled Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) squares off against amphibian-faced Lord…
Based on a typically heart-wrenching case study by Oliver Sacks, this admirably modest adaptation tells the story of Gabriel Sawyer (Lou Taylor Pucci), a homeless hippie whose burnout isn’t the product of drug abuse but a ballooning benign tumor that’s erased his memory. Institutionalized in the mid-1980s and rejoined with…
Cobbled together from a six-part BBC2 miniseries telecast last fall, The Trip is a talkative faux-reality road film largely improvised by funnymen Steven Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing versions of themselves under the direction of Michael Winterbottom. When his American girlfriend cancels, Coogan — who has supposedly been hired by…
Vivaciously confirming the timelessness of A.A. Milne’s talking teddy bear, Disney’s frickin’ adorable return to the Hundred Acre Wood is a wonderfully faithful throwback to the ’60s animated features (and the original Ernest H. Shepard book illustrations that inspired the studio’s watercolored, 2-D look) with a modest veneer of postmodern…
Nobody cries “Stop the presses!” in Andrew Rossi’s Page One: Inside the New York Times; no one would dare. There’s a palpable fear that it could actually happen. Rossi’s documentary, which might have been called Inside Baseball: Inside the New York Times, opens with a montage of the press in…
There’s a scene in Horrible Bosses in which Jennifer Aniston, playing a dentist who habitually sexually harasses her weakling male hygienist (Charlie Day), repeatedly says the word pussy. Her character is trying to intimidate his, while the filmmakers attempt to shock the audience with the spectacle of this lady rom-com…
It’s complete,” grizzled, wistful Frank (Rutger Hauer) says in the opening scene of Bride Flight, right before he croaks among the well-groomed rows of his New Zealand vineyard. “I’m a happy farmer.” With that, the reunion of three women whose lives (and more) he touched is set into motion, along…
Playing an emotionally asphyxiated illustrator whose cancer-stricken dad comes out of the closet at age 75, Ewan McGregor looks positively yummy in Beginners, a gay-is-OK dramedy from the distributor that brought us The Kids Are All Right. In fact, this semiautobiographical movie by SoCal skater-boy-turned-graphic-designer-and-filmmaker Mike Mills has no shortage…
Based on the true story of an 84-year-old Kenyan who took his government’s “education for all” promise literally, The First Grader turns literacy into historical melodrama. Character is history in Justin Chadwick’s dramatization of the story that made international headlines in 2003, a choice that gives the film a rough…
One of the few justifiable recent excursions into 3-D, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams documents a secret wonder of the world, the Chauvet cave — a subterranean gallery of 300 animal images discovered in 1994 in the south of France. Twice as old as the paintings at Lascaux yet…
For a movie called Larry Crowne, it sure is tough to get a solid read on the character of Larry Crowne. As the film opens, Larry seems content with his lot in life — before being fired for lacking a college education from his job at U-Mart, a big-box store…
From Tad Friend’s New Yorker profile of Anna Faris (which Jezebel.com reblogged under the headline “Hollywood Insiders Admit Hollywood Hates Women”) to the glass-ceiling-shattering pressure assigned to last month’s Bridesmaids (which has thus far outgrossed every previous Judd Apatow project since Knocked Up), a case could be made that 2011…
