After its predecessor’s vain attempt at newsworthy health-insurance and mortgage-lender commentary, this latest Saw again strives for relevance via the trendiest gimmick available: 3-D! Or, rather, post-production conversion 3-D, which further uglifies its flat, gloomy aesthetics, and thus proves in keeping with the overall cruddy nature of Lionsgate’s annual horror…
The Trotsky poses the question: What’s a young dissident to do in our postmodern world of iPods and Facebook, especially if he’s a teenaged rebel without a cause? The film also answers the question: Take on the oppressive institution we call high school and try to put power back in…
If there’s any doubt that patriarchy is alive and well — in some cultures more than in others — consider this wrenching drama exhibit A. It’s a remarkably assured first feature from writer/director Feo Aladag, and it has already amassed a handful of well-earned honors around the world, including the…
He’s normally reticent, nerdy, and on edge, but by midway through this film, Danish psychologist Adrian Gabrielsen (Nikoaj Lie Kaas) proves that behind his wire-rimmed specs lurks the will of Rambo. After suffering under an overbearing father and a stagnating practice, Gabrielsen jumps at an offer from the Danish government…
Robert De Niro’s alarm must have finally gone off — in Stone, the actor seems more awake than he has in years. De Niro is Jack, a prison corrections officer who, abandoning all professional and common sense, foolishly screws himself by screwing Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), the wife of cornrowed arsonist…
As suggested by its title, Allen Ginsberg’s game-changing poem Howl is essentially performative — and so is Howl, the Sundance-opening quasibiographical movie by Oscar-winning documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Howl the movie — which, in addition to touching on Ginsberg’s early life (and successful coming out), dramatizes the poem’s…
Is America’s last cowboy icon prospecting for more Oscar gold? Taking for his map an original screenplay by British docu-dramatist Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon), Clint Eastwood rides a sleepy burro deep into Iñárritu territory. Multiple story lines cross international borders to mix personal tragedy with post-9/11 existential terror. Hereafter…
After Fox Searchlight’s Amelia spectacularly flamed out last October, the studio tries again to grab awards-season honors with another biopic starring and executive-produced by Hilary Swank. As Conviction’s Betty Anne Waters, a Massachusetts high school dropout and single mom who put herself through law school to exonerate her brother, Kenny,…
For the past half-decade, Romain Duris has been French cinema’s go-to brooder. Diversifying his saturnine handsomeness, Duris gives his artfully disheveled brunet mop and permanent three-day stubble a workout in the overextended, hopped-up Heartbreaker, which puts the “antic” in romantic comedy. The premise of Heartbreaker, the first feature by TV…
A quartet of uneven TV pilots posing as a full-length documentary, Seth Gordon’s anthology Freakonomics pulls case studies from Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s bestselling book of pop math and hands them to famous doc filmmakers to make their own. Gordon (King of Kong) knits together the resulting shorts with…
Classiest. Comic. Book. Movie. Ever. Not the best. Not the worst. Just the classiest — Helen Mirren (and Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich) can spruce up any pulp. The original Warren Ellis comic — a straight-ahead tale about a retired company hit man named Frank Moses (played here by Bruce…
Published five years ago, Kazuo Ishiguro’s massively praised Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate universe where life has been extended and catastrophic illness eliminated, thanks to an evolutionary advance, namely the harvesting of vital organs from specially bred human clones. But that’s backstory. Despite its lurid premise,…
Davis Guggenheim’s call-to-arms documentary on the failures of the U.S. public-education system — thoroughly laudable in intention if maddening in its logic and omissions — originated with his own guilty conscience. An Academy Award winner for 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, the director, whose debut doc, 2001’s The First Year, heralded…
SyFy Network house director Steven R. Monroe remakes Meir Zarchi’s 1978 quintessential revenge-rape/rape-revenge film. Jennifer (Sarah Butler) rents a cabin in black-mud, backwoods Louisiana to work in peace on her second novel. An encounter with a local gas-station attendant (Jeff Branson) that crackles with class anxiety starts him and his…
Robert De Niro’s alarm must have finally gone off — in Stone, the actor seems more awake than he has been in years. De Niro is Jack, a prison corrections officer who, abandoning all professional and common sense, foolishly screws himself by screwing Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), the wife of corn-rowed…
Set up on a blind date by their married best friends, Holly (Katherine Heigl) and Messer (Josh Duhamel) show each other the worst of themselves. (“You look like you read,” he says disparagingly. Trust me, she doesn’t.) They separate in a huff before making it to dinner. Soon, the best…
Horses make lousy protagonists, what with their inability to speak, emote, or do much of anything other than run or stand around. No surprise, then, that Secretariat employs its subject as merely a vehicle for a human victory-over-adversity story, which, in this based-on-real-events case, involves owner Penny Chenery (Diane Lane)…
English art star Sam Taylor-Wood’s oddly straightforward biopic about the juvenile John Lennon concludes, as well it should, with the singer’s haunting, incantatory primal scream “Mother.” But instead of tying a bow on the film’s portrait of familial abandonment, Lennon’s guttural, air-cleaving quaver puts everything that precedes it to shame…
A film seemingly designed to get every New York City honors student punched in the face at college, It’s Kind of a Funny Story chronicles a privileged Brooklyn high-schooler’s supercool institutionalized mental-health break. Hot for his best friend’s girlfriend, stressed out over an application to a prestigious summer school, and…
Paul (Ryan Reynolds), an American truck driver for a KBR-type contractor in Iraq, is captured in an insurgent attack and wakes up buried in a coffin, totally defenseless but for a Zippo, a pencil, a flask, a flashlight, anti-anxiety meds, and someone else’s cell phone. He uses the latter to…
The Social Network is a wonderful title, at once Olympian in its detachment and self-descriptive in its buzz. Everyone will opine (and tweet) on this Scott Rudin-produced, Aaron Sorkin-scripted, David Fincher-directed, universally anticipated tale of Facebook’s genesis and founding genius — at least until something sexier comes along. The main…
Following up his Beijing Olympics opening-ceremony mega-production, Zhang Yimou remakes the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple by dressing it up in flamboyant silk and translating it to Mandarin. The honky-tonk of the Coens’ Southwestern noir becomes a noodle-shop compound on the edge of a Western China painted desert, sometime in the…
