Modish blankness tries to pass for clarity in Let Me In, Cloverfield director Matt Reeves’ Americanized remake of the Swedish boutique hit Let the Right One In. Reeves faithfully adopts the international-style flatness of Tomas Alfredson’s film, a mixture of “philosophical” long shots, brittle scoring, spartan cutting, and slowed-pulse performances…
Jack Goes Boating is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s movie — it’s his directorial debut; he stars as its namesake sad sack; he wears his hair in those terrible dreadlocks that he covered with a big woolen hat at the Oscars last spring — but let’s talk about John Ortiz instead. Yes,…
Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps doesn’t have the clean, fable-like arc of its predecessor. The buccaneer charisma of Michael Douglas’ signature role as Gordon Gekko obscured the moral soul of Wall Street. But everything now is so much murkier. Money Never Sleeps employs whiz-kid proprietary trader Jake Moore…
Dorky and earnest, aboriginal teen Willie (Rocky McKenzie) proves deep down a dissident when he escapes Catholic boarding school in 1969 Perth, extinguishing the fire and brimstone of Father Benedictus (a hammy, German-inflected Geoffrey Rush) through cheeky song: “There’s nothing I would rather be/Than to be an Aborigine/And watch you…
Animal Logic, the digital-effects studio responsible for both dancing penguin phenomenon Happy Feet and Zack Snyder phenomenon 300, creates more anatomically accurate anthropomorphic protagonists and expressionistic landscape panoramas in Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. Directed by Snyder and based on Kathryn Lasky’s children’s books, Legend of the…
Directing himself as a verifiable big-movie lead after some time in supporting-actor Triple-A ball, Ben Affleck models a full line of warm-up suits to play Doug MacRay, a second-generation blue-collar stick-up man, the brains of his four-man bank crew. The setting is Charlestown, the square-mile majority-Irish Boston neighborhood that’s half-gentrified…
As far as teen comedies informed by tenth-grade English syllabi go, Easy A, partly inspired by The Scarlet Letter, is remedial ed compared with Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You. High-schooler Olive (Emma Stone, confirming the talent shown in supporting roles in Superbad and The House Bunny) convinces…
Someday they’ll make an animated movie in which carnivorous animals actually kill and eat their prey; until then, we’re stuck with the likes of Alpha and Omega, where the big lion-versus-dinner encounter involves felines dodging a caribou stampede. That scene is shamelessly stolen from The Lion King and written by…
Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals safety who enlisted in the Army Rangers eight months after September 11, read Emerson, Chomsky, and, though an atheist, the Bible. Resembling a beefier Seann William Scott, he shunned cell phones, cars, and professional-athlete megalomania. A fiercely private (and principled) person, his death in Afghanistan…
Discretely drawn and elegantly photographed, Mademoiselle Chambon gives a French, working-class love triangle the brief-encounter treatment. With long, steadfast takes and portraiture framing, director Stéphane Brizé creates an atmosphere that cradles the delicate connection that develops between her main characters, a bricklayer named Jean (Vincent Lindon) and his young son’s…
Elegant opening credits, written as if calligraphy on a wedding invitation, yield to a couple in blunt close-up — unhappy, interracial, tearfully celebrating their anniversary in a shopping-mall restaurant. After an unfathomable exchange, he presents her with an antique bowl found on eBay and, after reciting a guffaw-worthy litany of…
Having directed the first Resident Evil and written every installment since, crap auteur Paul W.S. Anderson returns behind the camera to put series hero (now his wife) Milla Jovovich through the 3-D paces. It’s unclear why Resident Evil—at four films and a decade’s time—is the most successful video-game-turned-film franchise ever,…
Lebanon, written and directed by Samuel Maoz, is the strongest new movie of any kind I’ve seen in 2010. Like Ari Folman’s groundbreaking animation Waltz With Bashir before it, Lebanon is a film by a traumatized veteran. But where Waltz With Bashir is mainly concerned with the recollection of that…
“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” says John Cusack in High Fidelity, a very good romantic comedy about a 30something man who can’t maintain a relationship, partially because he’s holding on to stale record-nerd dreams. Going the Distance is a not-very-good romantic comedy about…
Judging by the advertisements, The American is a fast-paced, stylish thriller starring George Clooney as a dashing, conflicted hero. Yet the actual movie is a deconstructed action picture in which not much happens (until it does). Directed by Anton Corbijn and adapted from Martin Booth’s novel A Very Private Gentleman,…
Things you should know going in: Mexicans like hydraulics in their cars, and white people assume all Mexicans are janitors or gardeners. Created by Robert Rodriguez for Danny Trejo, Machete is a leather-faced, ex-Federale turned down-and-dirty hitman turned violent crusader on behalf of his fellow illegal immigrants. Machete is hired…
With a small, well-chosen cast, sly script, and slippery, ambivalent characters, The Last Exorcism gives a welcome twist to the demonic-possession movie revival. A fourth-generation minister, Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) of Baton Rouge’s Church of St. Mark was groomed for the pulpit. Onetime child preacher Cotton has grown out of…
You’ll be forgiven for groaning through the first 20 minutes of Rob Reiner’s Flipped, which kicks off in a key of aggressively picturesque whiteness — I mean, wholesomeness. Adapted by Reiner and Andrew Scheinman from a novel by Wendelin Van Draanen and set in a late-’50s America rooted more in…
“Come drink with me from the goblet of destruction,” T.I.’s bank robber quotes Genghis Khan before Takers’ big heist kicks off—and he’s not joking. Acting as both producer and plot fulcrum, T.I. is the big human attraction in Takers, possessing the raw energy that charisma vacuums Paul Walker and Hayden…
Good films about ballet can be numbered on one hand. And about Chinese dissidents? I’ve still got enough fingers to type this review. Based on the memoirs of Li Cunxin, Mao’s Last Dancer means well, but it stumbles between genres. Li is played by three actors as he grows from…
Beyond fans of Mélanie Laurent — who furiously fingers a fiddle and wears flashback wigs — The Concert may appeal to those who delight in stereotypes (Jews like money!). Andrei Filipov (Aleksei Guskov) pushes a broom at the Bolshoi, where he lost his status as star conductor 30 years ago…
Suspiciously employing the same thug flashiness, upbeat nouveau-ethnic soundtrack, and glamorously shot poverty found in fellow shantytown raves City of God and Sin Nombre, director Josh Crook’s straightforward revenge thriller also shares those films’ aesthetic aim: to find the tonal overlap between brutality and elegance. If La Soga feels neither…
