Though it’s difficult to pinpoint the typical Berlin Film Festival film, I’ve attended the festival enough times to attest that most pictures in the competition lean toward the somber end of the scale: You’re more likely to see a drama about immigrants in tough circumstances or children left to fend…
The endless love in question unfolds in that universe where shy, bookish teenage girls are always catalog-model beautiful, not a pimple in sight or a pound overweight, not a garment from Hot Topic darkening their closets. The movie tells us that 17-year-old Jade Butterfield (Gabriella Wilde) is “awkward” and has…
Director José Padilha’s long-delayed RoboCop reboot has arrived, and it’s neither an unalloyed (see what I did there?) triumph nor the travesty that partisans of Paul Verhoeven’s subversive Reagan-era classic had feared. At least, and at most, it’s different, taking bold liberties with the original text, as remakes should. One…
Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, both of which publish special daily issues at the major international festivals, may be the most famous movie trade magazines. But every morning at any of these festivals, including Berlin, most critics I know – and probably plenty of industry people, too – turn to…
Consider the Lego, the toy of contradiction. With one — well, with hundreds of them — you can build anything: houses, airplanes, house-airplanes. You can even build something that will change the world, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin did in 1996 when they housed the server for their new…
Claude Lanzmann built Shoah, his nine-hour, 1985 Holocaust documentary, from more than 350 hours of footage — interviews, staged scenes, silent European landscapes as seen from a passing train, their secrets reborn in tender shades of green. One interview, with the only surviving former chairman of a Czech ghetto’s Nazi-appointed…
Art may not be more important than human lives. But on the list of things that mean something to human lives, across centuries, it ranks pretty high. That’s what’s so compelling about the story of the Monuments Men, a group of people from 13 nations who volunteered to protect cultural…
The Outsider takes place in a world of endless lens flares, a J.J. Abrams–inspired visual tic as derivative as the rest of this vigilante B-movie in which no-nonsense British military contractor Lex Walker (Craig Fairbrass) returns to L.A. upon hearing of the overdose death of his daughter, Sam (Melissa Ordway)…
How retrograde are many of the core tenets of the Disney princess? Consider this: My daughter owns a book called Snow White’s Secret, in which Disney’s royal archetype reveals her devilish hidden life: When the Dwarfs are working at the mine, she sneaks into their cottage and joyfully cleans the…
Greetings from the 64th annual Berlin Film Festival, where it’s a surprisingly balmy 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit). The weather here may not be business as usual, but the festival looks promising — the competition includes films by Alain Resnais, Lou Ye, Yoji Yamada, and Claudia Llosa (whose odd…
It’s a little sad that Colin Farrell has outgrown roles that require him to wear raggedy sweaters and say things like “For fook’s sake!” It had to happen, though. Farrell has always made a terrific bad boy, but he clearly knows he couldn’t be a scamp forever, and he seems…
Quick, somebody check Jason Reitman’s house to see if the real man has been turned into dust by a body snatcher. Though his name’s on the poster, it’s impossible to believe that the sardonic boy wonder of Juno, Thank You for Smoking, and Young Adult would direct this stilted romance…
“We won’t make the world a better place, but at least we won’t make it worse,” says Franciszek Kalina (Ireneusz Czop) to his younger brother, Józef (Maciej Stuhr), near the climax of Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s Aftermath. That stark cynicism permeates Pasikowski’s unsettling historical drama. The story is simple — two siblings…
While our ingenues scurry toward teen best sellers and David O. Russell flicks, here’s the next generation of talented leading men swaggering into a dude-bro Sex and the City. At night, best friends played by Zac Efron, Miles Teller, and Michael B. Jordan — aka the player, the goof, and…
A favorite pastime of critics and serious filmgoers, perhaps the most idiotic and fruitless one, is to complain about how bad the movies have gotten. The complaint is meaningless, because no matter how “bad” the movies get, there are always, always actors. There’s no such thing as a golden age…
You can say this for the Disney teen machine: They sure know how to pick ’em. Vanessa Hudgens was 17 when High School Musical made her famous, the tail end of a generation of Mouseketeers that included her contemporaries Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus, and Selena Gomez, and her elders Justin…
Audaciously overcooked in its fussy grandeur and telegraphed plot twists, Cinema Paradiso writer/director Giuseppe Tornatore’s obsessive-quest drama strains toward being a thriller under Ennio Morricone’s strident score. Geoffrey Rush is on the money as hoity-toity art auctioneer Virgil Oldman, whose auction-block witticisms and Sherlock-worthy ability to deduce centuries-old forgeries impress…
It’s particularly disappointing to watch a film “based on a true story,” an interesting one at that, and suspect that what’s on the screen must pale in comparison to what really happened. That nagging frustration overshadows Summer in February, a ceaselessly bland take on the famed Lamorna artists’ colony in…
Let’s start with the ending: the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been done by one of the eight…
Every Sundance there’s a crowd-pleaser, and most years it’s got one degree of separation from the Little Miss Sunshine crew. But the most delightful flick of the 2014 fest is an unconventional documentary with no plot, no dialogue, and nothing but party. Living Stars, a fleet 63-minute film by Argentinean…
There are four good things we can say about I, Frankenstein, another muscles-and-rubble comic book adaptation just un-terrible enough not to alienate its core audience, yet never consistently grand or surprising enough to win over anyone else. First, Aaron Eckhart brings it, scowling like a champ beneath his jigsawed scar…
In Devil’s Due, co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (V/H/S) and first-time screenwriter Lindsay Devlin offer an uninspired found-footage riff on Roman Polanski’s demon-spawn classic, Rosemary’s Baby (1968). On their Dominican Republic honeymoon, the squeakily innocent Samantha (Allison Miller) and Zach (Zach Gilford) are drugged by a cult who draw…
