J.R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir about his recalcitrant German shepherd, My Dog Tulip, is one of the finest, most insightful chronicles of interspecies devotion. It’s the antithesis of both Marley & Me cuddliness and Cesar Millan militancy. A complex love story, his book plumbs the inner lives of hounds: “I realized…
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale creates something of a new origin story for Santa Claus—or, rather, reintroduces with dark glee some of the original pagan myths that have long been glossed over by the market forces behind what a character sneeringly calls “The Coca-Cola Santa.” When a mysterious businessman looks…
The Roommate is exactly what you thought it would be: a plagiarized, campus-set Single White Female pitched to teens. The Roommate traces over scenes from Barbet Schroeder’s sleepover classic with no notable improvement (the big-gasp “This girl is crazy” moment moves from the hairdresser’s to a tattoo parlor; the menaced…
There are few narratives more compelling than a survival story like director Peter Weir’s new adventure yarn. The protagonists of The Way Back are a group of Soviet prisoners who escape the Gulag during World War II, trekking 4,000 miles from Siberia to Outer Mongolia, across the Gobi Desert, over…
The Rite is the latest of at least a dozen widely released American movies in half as many years with demonic possession as a major plot point. This doesn’t mean the subject is wrung out — its continuing resonance with audiences hasn’t been effaced by secular pop psychology or modernization…
Mike Leigh’s Another Year concerns a year in the life of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), the happiest post-middle-aged married couple in the whole of the London suburbs. Unfolding in four episodes pegged to the seasons, Another Year’s arc covers the widening gulf between Tom and Gerri’s entitled…
Barney’s Version misses every opportunity for raucous, picaresque fun that the book throws its way while squandering a wealth of transatlantic performing talent led by Paul Giamatti. Richler was a gleeful provocateur who wrote in funny, excoriating, entertainingly hectic prose and had passion to burn. Giamatti mugs away gamely as…
Biutiful stays in one place (Barcelona) and follows one main character (Javier Bardem’s Uxbal) in a linear story line. Though its structure may be whittled down, Biutiful is morbidly obese, elephantine with miserabilist humanism and redemption jibber-jabber. Beyond dying of prostate cancer — a situation that calls for several scenes…
Codirector Thet Sambath, whose father (directly) and mother (indirectly) were murdered by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, chronicles his ongoing project to track down and document those responsible for the late-’70s reign of terror. Sambath draws on decade-long relationships he forged with Cambodia’s former second in command, Nuon Chea, and average…
A fascinating look at the complex intersections of art and charity, reality and perception, Waste Land follows celebrated New York artist Vik Muniz back to his native Brazil, where he’ll work with outer Rio garbage-pickers on an ambitious art project. Ostensibly called to “give back” to the impoverished region from…
Dissolute action-movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), first seen doing laps in his black Ferrari, has no destination in Somewhere, Sofia Coppola’s mood ring of celebrity lassitude. Coppola’s fourth feature is at times similarly aimless and empty. But those who groan that the writer/director has made another indulgent film about…
Tracking the parallel trajectories of three employees laid off from cushy corporate jobs at the same Boston-based manufacturing conglomerate, The Company Men is transparent in its ambition to capture The Way We Live Now from a sensitive, equitable — rather than a withering and satiric — point of view. Writer/director…
In 2000, Mark Hogancamp, an upstate New York resident, was beaten outside a bar by four men so badly that he incurred a brain injury and woke up to a life he barely remembered. Seriously disabled mentally, he has existed since by mopping floors and making diner meatballs in his…
No Strings Attached is extremely narrow in focus: It’s “just” about two people in lust struggling to put away their respective baggage in order to have a real relationship with each other. Adam (Ashton Kutcher) drunkenly texts every girl in his phone and wakes up the next morning at the…
Generously bankrolled, then shelved, by an imperiled Weinstein Co. and peopled with Oscar nominees, All Good Things might be called an upscale version of straight-to-cable true crime crap — only that would make it sound more entertaining than it is. The fiction feature debut of Andrew Jarecki, director of 2003’s…
Only inertia will bring people to Michel Gondry’s 3-D spectacle, The Green Hornet. Opening amid persistent negative buzz in the mid-January dead zone, this long-germinating prospective franchise, based on a character that first saturated the nation’s radio waves in 1939, seems pretty much DOA — although in the absence of…
Derek Cianfrance’s divorce drama Blue Valentine is the story of how a couple (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) travels from too-cute introduction to irreconcilable differences in just over half a decade. Starting with the present-day married-with-kid Dean and Cindy, Cianfrance weaves long flashbacks of Dean and Cindy’s early days through…
John Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole plops us down in the lives of Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart), 40-ish upper-class marrieds rattling around an East Coast dream house. Becca and Howie’s young son was killed in an accident, and months later, the couple is trying to cope. Howie thinks…
The fifth collaboration of director Margarethe Von Trotta and actress Barbara Sukowa, Vision continues the proto-feminist canonization of Blessed Hildegard von Bingen (Sukowa), 12th-century Benedictine magistra, scientist, visionary composer, and literal receptor of visions. Cloistered at age 8, Von Bingen grows into hardball politicking in the Holy Roman Empire as…
A fascinating look at the complex intersections of art and charity, reality and perception, Waste Land follows celebrated New York artist Vik Muniz back to his native Brazil, where he’ll work with outer Rio garbage-pickers on an ambitious art project. Ostensibly called to “give back” to the impoverished region from…
From Ron Howard, director of the better carmaker dramedy Gung Ho, The Dilemma is a myriad of subplots piled into the trunk of a lemon. Vince Vaughn is Ronny, co-owner of a boutique car-engine manufacturer. He’s the pitchman; the brains belong to Nick, played by Kevin James. Their intention—to build…
White Material is a portrait of change and a thing of terrible beauty. The time is unspecified. The subject is the collapse of an unnamed West African state, and the protagonist, Maria, a French settler unflinchingly played by Isabelle Huppert, is the proprietress of a family-run coffee plantation. White Material…
