The late George Hickenlooper’s Casino Jack is an improbably blithe cautionary tale, recounting the rise and fall of D.C. superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. “You’re either a big-leaguer or you’re a slave clawing your way onto the C train,” the avid antihero (Kevin Spacey) tells his mirrored reflection in the pre-credit sequence;…
Kelly Canter is the Courtney Love of country stars. Spectacular meltdowns on stage have forced Kelly (an inconsistently twanging Gwyneth Paltrow) into rehab. There, her decolletage decked out in black lace and a bling cross, she jams in more than one sense with singer-songwriter-janitor Beau (Tron fox Garrett Hedlund), until…
Season of the Witch begins in a Crusade taking place after the Crusades, in a 14th century For Dummies about as immersive and real as the Ohio State Renaissance Festival. Disillusioned, defected knights Behmen and Felson (Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman) retreat home across a hotchpotch Europe, and turn off…
Recording a three-day competition in Lyon, France, in which sugar is heated, stretched, and blown into delicate, rococo shapes, Kings of Pastry has none of the shame-and-humiliation rituals of reality-TV cook-offs like Top Chef. Though Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s food-fetishizing documentary offers a welcome break from the sensibilities and…
It has taken almost two years for the bonkers, exhilarating same-sex romantic comedy I Love You Phillip Morris to finally reach theaters. In the interim, we’ve bided our time with big-screen depictions of man-man love such as Brüno and Colin Firth’s suicidal fusspot in A Single Man. Save it, Mary:…
Just in time for the whole family to file into the multiplex on a silent Christmas night when there’s nowhere else to go: a return to the magnified dysfunction of the Focker household, and the cozy holiday glow of some paychecking celebrities. After a temporary truce, Ben Stiller’s mensch male…
Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture is a comedy of youthful confusion that gets its kick not only for evoking a world of unromantic hookups, casual BJs, and iPhone porn, but for satirizing New York’s bourgeois bohemia. Newly graduated from an artsy Midwestern college, Aura arrives at mother Siri’s immaculate white-on-white Tribeca…
A picnic for Anglophiles, not to mention a prospective Oscar bonanza, The King’s Speech is a well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor. The story is a good one: shy, young prince helped by irascible wizard to break an…
The Coen brothers’ True Grit is well-wrought, if overly talkative, and seriously ambitious. Opening with a strategically abbreviated Old Testament proverb (“The wicked flee when none pursueth”), the film returns the Coens to the all-American sagebrush and gun-smoke landscape that has best nourished their wise-guy sensibility. This perverse buddy tale,…
A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp — at the very least, it’s the most risible and riotous backstage movie since Showgirls. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake has had a spooky quality at least since Tod Browning appropriated a few bars of…
An odd duck of a romantic comedy, How Do You Know strays as far from a barrel of laughs as it can get without losing his grip altogether. The movie’s rhythms are loose, disjointed, and peppered with strategic silences or half-finished thoughts. The punchlines are few, and there’s not much…
Jeff Bridges is God and, as digitally captured from the original 1982 Tron, he’s also the devil in the megamillion-dollar reboot Tron: Legacy. The notion of a tragically split persona might have been scripted to give the new movie a measure of emotional gravitas, but why bother with writing when…
The Fighter is based on the true story of light-welterweight champ “Irish” Micky Ward from Lowell, Massachusetts. But starring Boston working-class hero Mark Wahlberg, it plays as a Rocky-fied fairy tale for our time: Consigned to Palookaville, a sweet, unassuming boxer with more heart than brains steps up — all…
Disney took up C.S. Lewis’ seven-volume (!) Chronicles of Narnia project in the giddy post-Lord of the Rings atmosphere. But after failing to return the requisite billions, this third adaptation comes underwritten by a new studio, 20th Century Fox, and with a new director, Michael Apted, working from one of…
Airily disregarding the Hemingway “unadaptability principle,” this quaintly racy version of Papa’s most hated novel has a few bullets in its barrel: Dynasty scion Jack Huston, as the Hem avatar, is dull but physically a perfect fit, the Mediterranean tourist porn is addictive, and the story is thick with sex…
Men follow Angelina Jolie in The Tourist. Men and cameras. They follow her — chic, coiffed, assless — through the streets of Paris. They follow her onto the train to impossible, floating Venice, where she heads on the instruction of her shadowy, fugitive lover. Eventually, they follow fellow passenger Johnny…
Rock-bottom expectations are rewarded, sort of, in this update of Hanna-Barbera’s necktied ursus, which hopes to outdo the live action/computer animation success of the Alvin and the Chipmunks franchise by adding one more dimension. Yogi (who debuted in 1958 and was loosely based on The Honeymooners’ Ed Norton) is voiced…
Florida Atlantic University opens a new movie house this week that quite simply may become South Florida’s home to independent cinema. The Living Room has four theaters that seat 50. Indie, foreign, and classic films will show every weekend. A café will serve gourmet food, coffee, beer, and wine. And…
A very, very loose and highly symbolic adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void is both a lame fusion of stoner lifestyle, sexual fetish, and philosophical inquiry and a technical achievement that can’t be as easily dismissed. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is a young, drug-dealing…
In her recent English-speaking roles, 50-year-old bilingual Kristin Scott Thomas has gamely endured the fate of most actresses her age, cast as the fretful mother of Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson in The Other Boleyn Girl and the pinched, sexless guardian of Aaron Johnson’s John Lennon in Nowhere Boy. Her…
“All Brazilians know how to dance,” says the mother of one of the two ballet students at the heart of Only When I Dance. “It’s in our blood.” No one who has seen YouTube’s latest darling — a Brazilian baby working some serious samba moves — could disagree. Making a…
The usually silver-tongued Eliot Spitzer stammers and hesitates when asked to explain the psychosexual motivations behind his spectacular flameout in Alex Gibney’s gripping Client 9 — or, if you prefer, Inside Blow Job. Spitzer, whose tireless efforts to redeem himself led to his cooperation in this doc, receives an entirely…
