Salt, a spy flick rewritten for Angelina Jolie after Tom Cruise dropped out, has been publicized as the cinematic equivalent of the 19th Amendment: finally, a level playing field for female action stars! This is mostly bullshit, of course — Jolie’s Evelyn Salt is not the first action hero to…
Inception is a chilling trip into the psyche of writer/director Christopher Nolan, an American action director who shattered the Tomatometer of mass consensus with The Dark Knight. Nolan’s follow-up offers more muted colors, gift-wrapped themes, and GQ-style leading men with stockbroker comb-backs over the frowns carved in their brows —…
Named for the last good outing by Walt Disney’s rodent mascot, this Bruckheimer-produced Apprentice pays homage to Mickey’s dancing mops but draws more from modern road-tested blockbuster elements: Spidey’s nerd-turned-superhero wish fulfillment and Harry Potter’s boy wizardry. Nicolas Cage plays Balthazar Blake, a 1,300-year-old understudy of Merlin who finds his…
In Cyrus, a freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them, the excellent John C. Reilly plays John, a middle-aged editor who lives like a stalled graduate student in his cluttered Los Angeles cottage. That’s where his former wife and close friend, Jamie (Catherine…
Watered-down Jungian analysis meets a GLAAD-approved weepie in Peter Bratt’s second feature, starring brother Benjamin (who also produces) as a neck-tattooed macho who will finally realize the damage his rock-hard masculinity has caused during a funeral for a teenaged gangbanger, his tears mixing with the rain. As subtle as a…
Coco Chanel. Igor Stravinsky. Two iconoclasts whose contributions to their respective artistic fields left an indelible mark on the 20th Century. Did you know they used to bone? After a lengthy staging of the disastrous 1913 premiere of “The Rite of Spring” (the sole sympathetic set of ears in the…
This grim and bloody adaptation of the second volume of the late Stieg Larsson’s bestselling Millennium trilogy — featuring journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) — moves the story into a very different register from the stand-alone murder mystery of The Girl With the…
This Robert Rodriguez–produced sequel goes back into the bush to follow 1987’s Predator—a sci-fi horror that put the multi-megaton American stud-soldiers of Reagan-era action in the infra-red, stalking POV of a higher-tech galactic Superpower. This time, U.S. black ops turned soldier-of-fortune Royce (Adrien Brody, knotty with new muscle) literally plummets…
As unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous as its title, Luca Guadagnino’s visually ravishing third feature suggests an epic that Visconti and Sirk might have made after they finished watching Vertigo and reading Madame Bovary while gorging themselves on aphrodisiacs. That it works so well — despite frequently risible dialogue (“Happy is…
Marcus (Philip Winchester) is a parasomniac: It looks like he’s awake, but he’s sleepwalking, a convenient excuse for, say, sleeping with your best friend’s wife. And lo and behold, when she turns up dead, it’s hard for Marcus to maintain his friendship with Justin (Tim Draxl). Sure, he didn’t mean…
An exploded grandfather clock of a movie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s intricately antic Micmacs hurls gears, gizmos, and other trash-heap objets d’art at the audience. It’s aggressively, whimsically retro, like a heaping second helping of his 1992 black comedy Delicatessen. Instead of the enchanted fairyland of his smash hit Amélie, Jeunet burrows…
You know and love Jason Bourne as an implacable killing machine. But what if he were a mouthy asshole instead? That’s the provocative question posed by James Mangold’s Knight and Day, which casts Tom Cruise as a Bourne wannabe who seriously can’t shut up. As Roy Miller, an agent gone…
Opening with a close-up of the crow’s feet around its subject’s eyes and expanding to reveal her Botox-frozen upper lip, the documentary/portrait Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work celebrates Saint Joan the Resilient, Showbiz Survivor. Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg dogged the indomitable standup comic throughout the course of her…
By Nick Pinkerton You’ve probably seen the poster for Grown Ups, with its stars—Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Kevin James—barreling down a waterslide. Or is the verb I’m looking for “coasting”? Grown Ups begins with a flashback to a 1978 boys’ basketball championship, where the starting…
A genuinely hip, thought-provoking work of art disguised as a doomed documentary resurrected, Exit Through the Gift Shop is not just the definitive portrait of street-art counterculture but also a hilarious exposé on the gullibility of the masses who embrace manufactured creative personas. It’s credited as a picture by Banksy,…
Fifteen years after ushering in a new era of CGI animation and 11 years after a colossally successful premillennial sequel, the Toy Story franchise returns to a changed world. Its irresistible conceit and snappy good humor remain largely intact, though now it also hauls a saltier and more anxious sensibility…
What might strike American viewers as the most quizzical thing about Looking for Eric, Ken Loach’s humble ode to soccer heroes and coming of middle age in Manchester, is not its footie fixation but the unholy fuss kicked up by the possession of a single handgun. Hidden under the floorboards…
Grinning into the camera, a young Mormon in a Prop. 8 commercial highlighted in 8: The Mormon Proposition gushes that her activism around getting the ballot measure passed (to restrict the definition of marriage in California to opposite-sex couples) “makes me feel American.” Diving into the grim irony of one…
Bracingly inept, Chef Boyardee spaghetti western Jonah Hex is the rare 80-minute movie that you can’t even call “taut.” Rather than teasing out curiosity about its outcast hero’s past, Jonah pelts the viewer with clumps of exposition, including a hasty comic-book-graphic origin montage illustrating the strange case of Hex (Josh…
Like many historical dramas and biopics, John Rabe operates between the extremes of broad-stroked symbolism and selective detail, between poetic license and classroom exposition, between history and his story. The film recounts the true and largely overlooked actions of German businessman Rabe (a fine Ulrich Tukur), whose decision to remain…
Directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien, frequent writing partners who scripted Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, have here created The Michael Douglas Experience; whether you respond to the material depends largely on how much you enjoy the actor lazily riffing on the oily creatures of his past. After a prologue…
Nicole Holofcener’s fourth feature, Please Give, is a notable rebound from the self-absorption of her last movie, Friends With Money. It’s still not quite as good as Holofcener’s mordant Lovely & Amazing, but it is, for the most part, witty and engrossing. Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are…
