Wholly unrelated to the 1975 Sam Peckinpah film of the same name, Killer Elite is distinguished by one no-mercy, eye-gouging, testicle-punching brawl and one whoppingly indifferent screenplay. After a collateral-damage close call awakens his conscience — the first of many perfunctorily recycled bits to come — hit man Danny Bryce…
Celebrity airplane wizzer Gérard Depardieu, playing massive dimwit Germain in this syrupy tale of intergenerational friendship, looks aghast when a bar buddy, in a state of pickled despair, takes a leak on his own front steps. No PR materials I’ve received for My Afternoons With Margueritte, based on a novel…
As stripped down and propulsive as its robotic title, Drive is the most “American” movie yet by Danish genre director Nicolas Winding Refn. The film, for which Refn was named best director last May in Cannes, is a sleek, tense piece of work that, as a vehicle for Ryan Gosling,…
What I don’t know: why these movies keep getting made. I Don’t Know How She Does It is based on Allison Pearson’s 2002 diaristic, comic bestseller and directed by Douglas McGrath. But its real auteur is screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, scripter of wan workplace romantic comedies such as the limp…
Life is a series of constant adjustments to ever-shifting realities in Gun Hill Road, a Brooklyn-set indie about a criminal, Enrique (Esai Morales), who returns home after a three-year prison term to find that things aren’t quite as he remembered them. Specifically, wife Angela (Judy Reyes) is trying to end…
“AIDS” isn’t uttered until well past the halfway mark of Oliver Schmitz’s problematic South Africa-based tale about the fear, gossip, and superstition surrounding the illness in a township 125 miles outside Johannesburg. Bright, stoic 12-year-old Chanda (affecting newcomer Khomotso Manyaka) puts her studies on hold to handle one unbearable situation…
As reported in a New York Times Magazine cover story on the actress in 2006 (three years before her Oscar-nominated performance in Up in the Air), Vera Farmiga has expressed her disgust with the roles offered to her by setting scripts on fire: “I stack up all those crass female…
Currently the fifth-to-last film on Steven Soderbergh’s ever-expanding preretirement slate, Contagion opens on day two of a global viral epidemic. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Beth Emhoff, an American employee for an ominously unspecific multinational corporation who returns from a business trip in Hong Kong to her wintry Midwestern home feeling like…
You know those Affliction shirts, covered in skulls, gothic lettering, and tribal patterns, all cacophonous symbols of badass machismo? That’s what the mixed martial arts tie-in movie Warrior is — an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink fire sale of male-weepie tropes, awesome in its thoroughness. The collective dream of authentic blue-collar American grubbiness lives…
A group of 30-somethings trapped in the amber of their high school years attempts to bone its way into adulthood in A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, an ensemble sex comedy written and directed by Larry Sanders Show writers Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck. Technically the orgy of the title is…
Point Blank, a French action film that has nothing to do with the 1967 (and highly Frenchified) John Boorman flick of the same name, opens with a bang: an apparent burglar (Roschdy Zem) running from the scene of an office break-in gone wrong. Zem is chased by a pair of…
A true-life outlaw tale as stirring as it is tragic, the story of the Earth Liberation Front offers a DeLillo-flavored draft of high-proof righteous excitement. You can hear the pitch — young, fiery 21st-century hipsters living double lives, burning down corporate buildings to protest environmental exploitation, leading to their own…
Precocious playwright Andrea Dunbar (1961 – 1990) spoke for the lumpen abused of her native Bradford, England; The Arbor, video artist Clio Barnard’s pitch-perfect Dunbar biopic, named best documentary last year at the Tribeca Film Festival, reprises her pungent, profane voice, but from a discreet distance. Barnard revisits the foredoomed…
Is there such thing as a sincerely calculated naïveté? Or put another way, does Miranda July have any idea of how annoying she is? On the basis of The Future, writer/filmmaker/performance artist July’s second feature, I’d guess she must. A fabricator of her own screen image, July — the high…
In Our Idiot Brother, Paul Rudd plays Ned, an upstate New York version of “The Dude” Lebowski who is “entrapped” into selling pot to a uniformed police officer and swiftly sent to jail. Post-prison, Ned discovers that his longterm girlfriend Janet (Kathryn Hahn) has taken up with a new dude,…
Die-hard horror fans (including this one) generally spend their adult lives hoping to re-experience the fear and awe they derived from the scary flicks they saw as kids. Which may be why Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro was inspired to co-produce and write (with Matthew Robbins) a remake of…
Brimming over with outrage not so much at the eponymous Ponzi schemer as against the government body that failed to rein him in, Chasing Madoff documents whistleblower Harry Markopolos’ futile 10-year effort to get the SEC to listen to his case against the world’s most notorious financier. Drawing on every…
A cinematic reboot for the patron saint of 98-pound weaklings, Conan the Barbarian is both truer to the vision of its character’s creator, Robert E. Howard, and more satisfyingly pulpy than John Milius’ 1982 movie incarnation. Director Marcus Nispel, along with no fewer than three screenwriters, eschews the lugubrious mythmaking…
Directed by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig from a screenplay and novel by David Nicholls, One Day stars Anne Hathaway as Emma, a too-serious would-be writer in Coke-bottle glasses and combat boots. She’s nursing a crush on Dexter (Jim Sturgess), her too-good-looking rich-boy college classmate. She’s earnest, tenacious, and crippled by…
Nothing screams “French crossover comedy” like jokes about Auschwitz and childhood sexual abuse, the main rib-ticklers of Michel Leclerc’s blood-clot-inducing second feature. Cowritten with Baya Kasmi, Leclerc’s partner for the past decade, and apparently inspired by their own culture-clash meet-cute, The Names of Love traces the bumptious courtship between reserved…
The Guard is a shaggy-man character study, its subject a 50-something policeman in West Ireland, Sgt. Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson). No by-the-book cop, Boyle spends his days off romping with hookers and has no qualms about gulping MDMA from the pockets of a freshly dead teenager — he also displays…
More than just the Hollywood “it” girl of the moment, Emma Stone is a real actress, and in The Help, she gets an ostentatious, Oscar-baiting big scene in which to prove it. Stone is, to borrow a phrase from Bret Easton Ellis’ Twitter account, thoroughly postempire — she doesn’t need…
