The documentary Audience Award winner at this year’s Sundance festival, Buck follows itinerant horse trainer Buck Brannaman as he applies his uniquely humane and frankly astounding methods in four-day clinics around the country. If that sounds as exciting as watching hay turn yellow, director Cindy Meehl finds the real story…
Given that some of its talking heads are no longer of this world, How to Live Forever quite clearly fails to provide the answer to its titular objective. Worse, however, is that it only dispenses aphorisms that one soon suspects director Mark Wexler — who positions his documentary as a…
A big-bang demolition derby, J.J. Abrams’ much-anticipated, greatly enjoyable Super 8 seems bound for box-office glory. Opening three weeks before July 4, this Steven Spielberg-produced, kidcentric, 21st-century disaster flick could well hang in at theaters till the tenth anniversary of 9/11 — an event that haunts Abrams’ surefire blockbuster nearly…
Including glimpses of Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin, the rings of Saturn, and a roadside Texas BBQ, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life bears a variety of forms — and invites as many reactions. You may feel amazed or muddled, softly spoken to or simply abandoned while watching it;…
Lebanon, PA begins as a tale about male, middle-aged self-discovery, but soon becomes something quite different: a clear-eyed if crassly manipulative take on the culture wars. Driving out to Rick Santorum country for his father’s funeral, slightly douchy Philadelphia ad exec Will (Josh Hopkins) discovers the pleasures and uglier aspects…
L’amour Fou opens with unbroken footage from designer Yves Saint-Laurent’s 2002 speech announcing his retirement from fashion, after 40-plus years at the helm of the massively important label bearing his name. It’s a stunning performance, flowing from naked confessional (“I have known the false friends of tranquilizers… and emerged dazzled…
Including glimpses of Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin, the rings of Saturn, and a roadside Texas BBQ, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life bears a variety of forms — and invites as many reactions. You may feel amazed or muddled, softly spoken to or simply abandoned while watching it;…
At the risk of being a Debbie Downer, watching Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer is akin to being trapped in the ADHD-addled mind of an adolescent hopped up on too much Ritalin. Adapted from Megan McDonald’s kids’ books, John Schultz’s tale mistakes hyperactivity for humor in recounting the…
If there’s a more complicated place than Italy to be a beautiful woman, the filmmaking world has yet to identify it. The First Beautiful Thing, Paolo Virzi’s winsome family melodrama, begins with an alluring young mother named Anna (Micaela Ramazzotti) being reluctantly crowned the evening’s belle, “Miss Mamma,” at a…
A nebbishy screenwriter who longs to publish a novel, Gil (Owen Wilson) is tentatively working on a book set in a nostalgia shop — much to the open frustration of Inez (Rachel McAdams), his all-too-modern, rich-girl fiancée, who has a tendency to talk about him in catty, judgy tones as…
Danish artist Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity documents an anti-monument to negativity. Admirably forward-thinking if undeniably quixotic, Finland’s government has undertaken the task of digging a hole in which to bury nuclear waste deep in the Earth. Located 100 miles northwest of Helsinki, Onkalo (Finnish for “hiding place”) is intended to…
Most sequels are born of good box office rather than good ideas — if you build it and they come, you simply must build another one — but it’s hard to imagine a more calculating, creatively bankrupt piece of real estate than The Hangover Part II. Trade out Las Vegas…
The finest Western you’ll see this year is set in aristocratic 16th-century France, in the heat of Counter-Reformation. Mélanie Thierry’s father barters her for the titular title, marrying her off to Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet’s shy, pained prince — instead of her heart’s first choice, Gaspard Ulliel’s Duke de Guise. De Guise…
Shouldering a title that’s redundant twice over, John Gray’s Noo Yawker indie is a stubborn throwback to the Sundance-fueled, ethnic-neighborhood movie of the early-’90s, when every film-school grad with a fresh head full of Mean Streets decided he would be the next Scorsese. Here it’s “Brooklyn, 1975,” and one nice,…
After sinking into self-important tedium with its prior two overstuffed installments, Pirates of the Caribbean seemed destined for permanent burial at sea. And yet the soggy franchise and Johnny Depp’s foppish rapscallion return again for On Stranger Tides — to search for the fountain of youth, no less, a quest…
Eight-millimeter home movies and statist hymns from the Soviet past haunt Robin Hessman’s documentary of a contemporary Russia pocked with international logos in which five Muscovites recall their lives and, in the process, 40 years of national history. A married couple, teachers Borya and Lyuba Meyerson, testify for the camera…
This latest blast of unwavering miserablism from Denis Villeneuve, Oscar-nominated and everything, reaches for something deeper than mere stroppy melodrama. Adapted from a 2003 play by Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies (“Scorched”) obliquely chronicles the adult life of Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), an Arab woman living in Canada whose sudden death sends…
Tenacious indie Kelly Reichardt has specialized in quirky, minimalist quasi-road movies in which loners come unmoored in some great American space. Meek’s Cutoff is that and more — one great leap into the 19th-century unknown. The members of a small wagon train crossing the Oregon Trail in 1845 follow their…
Built around the talents of cowriter/lead actress Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids is the first female-fronted comedy produced by Hollywood kingpin Judd Apatow, who has weathered criticism in the past for his brand’s dudecentric point of view. Bridesmaids’ core relationship is between Annie (Wiig) and her best friend of 30-plus years, Lillian…
Looking to documentaries to learn how to live could easily become a life-consuming occupation in itself. I’m waiting on the documentary about watching too many documentaries; it’s killing us, if you haven’t heard. Though in the cautionary doc mold, the opening of Forks Over Knives hardly whets the polemical appetite:…
The eight gentle Trappist monks depicted in Of Gods and Men uphold the faith that brought them from France to Algeria, only to be abducted and massacred, presumably by fanatics of a rival religious persuasion. The movie, based on a 1996 event that continues to resonate in France, opens on…
After chambermaid Hélène (Sandrine Bonnaire) glimpses an American couple (Jennifer Beals and Dominic Gould) playing chess in the upscale Corsican resort where she works, she becomes obsessed with the game and what it represents to her. The couple’s casually sexy interplay and wealth are in stark contrast to the hand-to-mouth…
