After a decade navigating Hollywood, John Woo returned to China to make his latest film, but scale back he did not. The most expensive movie ever produced in the country and also the biggest, Woo’s Red Cliff is a third-century battle royal with phalanxes of horsemen and armadas of battleships…
In a Dallas strip mall, in the neighborhood George W. Bush now calls home, sits a bright and fluorescent Blockbuster that, on this cold Thursday night in December, is populated by maybe a handful of customers — high schoolers grabbing a game, a middle-aged mom checking to see if Julie…
“Everything’s already happened to me,” laments Harry Caine, the blind, middle-aged filmmaker in Broken Embraces. “All that’s left is to enjoy life.” ¡Sí! His own sights set low these days in his latest movie, reformed bad boy Pedro Almodóvar has at least hit on a vivid metaphor for his diminished…
There’s no city-clogging traffic jam in Nine, the musicalized version of Federico Fellini’s movie-about-moviemaking urtext 8 1/2, but the result feels like the celluloid equivalent of a 12-car pileup. An assault on the senses from every conceivable direction — smash zooms, the ear-splitting eruption of something like music, the spectacle…
Closing out a pretty great year for children’s movies — Up, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Coraline among them — Betty Thomas’ dutiful animated and live-action sequel to 2007’s Alvin and the Chipmunks brings up the rear with capable mediocrity. It’s not entirely Thomas’ fault: What are you going…
As overemphatic as one might expect from the ham-fisted Guy Ritchie, this resurrection of the world’s most famous detective is a dank, noisy affair that unfolds in a gloomy London that seems a bootleg copy of A Christmas Carol’s CGI set. Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective was, in essence, a master…
Man, British heritage cinema can be dull and boring when assembly-lined for the export market. Laboring under lampshade millinery, hair that looks like cake, and more sumptuous banqueting than we should ever have to sit through, Emily Blunt is cute, sassy, and wildly improbable as the titular majesty-in-waiting, who, in…
A triumph of art direction over actual direction, fashion designer Tom Ford’s debut feature is nothing if not a master class in sartorial excellence, freshly exfoliated skin, and modern Southern California architecture. Based on Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel, A Single Man encompasses one day in the life of George Falconer…
Once more into the breach goes writer/director Nancy Meyers to show us what women really want, this time with Meryl Streep as a Santa Barbara restaurateur “of a certain age” faced with a smattering of life-altering crises. In Meyers’ most thinly veiled work of self-portraiture to date, Streep’s Jane Adler…
The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron’s mega-3-D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and, like the Hope Diamond waved in front of your nose, the bling is almost blinding. For the first 45 minutes, I’m thinking: Metropolis — and wondering how to amend ballots already cast in polls of…
Let’s be honest here: Did You Hear About the Morgans? is multiplex meringue compared to the meat-and-potatoes cinema at this most award-whoring time of year. Which is fine. Better than fine, frankly, as Hugh Grant yet again proves he’s the most reliable deadpan smartass this or that side of the…
Aside from Morgan Freeman, who makes a fabulous Nelson Mandela, there’s this to savor about Invictus, a rosy tale of racial reconciliation neatly wrapped in a triumphalist sports movie: The film is blessedly free of Obama parallels. Also, we could use a happy global moment, and Eastwood picks one out…
The most significant American artist before Andy Warhol to take “the media” as his medium, Orson Welles lives on not only in posthumously restored director’s cuts of his rereleased movies but as a character in other people’s novels, plays, and movies — notably Richard Linklater’s deft, affectionate, and unexpectedly enjoyable…
There is something oddly familiar about Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, in which George Clooney plays a commitment-phobic business traveler with no use for meaningful human interaction. Could have sworn we’ve been here before. When was it? And where? Oh, yes, of course: Joel and Ethan Coen’s Intolerable Cruelty,…
Don’t be misled by the cheesy, generic poster for Kirk Jones’ Everybody’s Fine, in which a grinning Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, and Kate Beckinsale pose with Robert De Niro (airbrushed almost to the point of being unrecognizable) for a family photo in front of a Christmas tree. It’s a marketing…
Jim Sheridan’s remake of Danish director Susanne Bier’s 2005 original on the familial and psychic trauma caused by Operation Enduring Freedom feels like Operation Endurance. Marine captain and stalwart head-of-household Sam (Tobey Maguire), married to his high school sweetheart, Grace (Natalie Portman), and proud pop of two adorable daughters, returns…
In 1947 British-occupied Jerusalem, a precocious patriot faces conflicting expectations of loyalty in this terminally mild, ill-structured adaptation of Amos Oz’s novel Panther in the Basement. Barely squeaking by the citywide curfews, 11-year-old Proffy (Ido Port) strikes up a friendship with one would-be enforcer, Sergeant Dunlop (Alfred Molina), an amateur…
Six decades after unleashing persistent NAACP bugaboo Song of the South (1946), that peculiar cultural institution known as the Walt Disney Co. has made a symbolic reparation by creating its first African-American princess—and plunking her down in the middle of Jim Crow-era Louisiana! For most of The Princess and the…
The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Oprah-endorsed, post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem — in which a father and his 10-year-old son traverse a despoiled landscape of unspeakable horror — was a quick, lacerating read. John Hillcoat’s literal adaptation, which arrives one Thanksgiving past its original release date is, by contrast, a…
Having braved zombies in 28 Days Later, Naomie Harris now faces a centuries-old clan of ninjas who have been hiring themselves out, Blackwater style, as government mercenaries. Sad to say, the undead were more fun. Directed by James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) and with Joel Silver and the Wachowskis as…
In her broad outlines, Claireece Precious Jones risks sounding like the epitome of ghetto cliché: an obese, illiterate 16-year-old; mother to a 4-year-old Down syndrome daughter and now pregnant again; physically and psychologically abused by her mother; repeatedly raped by her father, who is, also, the father of her own…
Given his preference for static, symmetrical, scrupulously color-coordinated and art-directed compositions, it’s less surprising that Wes Anderson has gotten around to directing an animated feature than that it took him this long to do it. Likewise, if Anderson — a nostalgia merchant whose ostensibly contemporary films always seem to be…
