The humanist virtues of John Sayles are readily apparent in the first scenes of Go for Sisters, his low-key border-crossing road trip mystery. Straight off, the writer-director-novelist treats us to two knotty, compelling monologues, a pair of showstoppers in the first 10 minutes, each delivered by characters you don’t see…
The late Paul Walker practiced the kind of manly American acting that often doesn’t look like acting at all. In movie after movie, many of them of the fast and/or furious variety, Walker performed the difficult trick of seeming to really be the apple-pie tough guys he played. In those…
Elves snore, it turns out. Their maidens make teensy-peen jokes and pine for the hottest of dwarves. And Bilbo Baggins, so concerned about his doilies just three hours of screen time ago, now punches his sword right through the trachea of a goblin — and then looks rather proud of…
Here’s a question you never thought you’d hear Noam Chomsky answer: “What makes you happy?” That puzzler comes near the end of Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, an animated marvel of a film rigged to set your brain off like fireworks. The great linguist and activist’s easy surge…
For all its nasty twists, the biggest shock in Spike Lee’s remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy hits in the movie’s first minutes — during the credits. “A Spike Lee Film,” a title card reads, a first for any of Lee’s features. Jungle Fever, He Got Game, Inside Man, last year’s…
Here’s how disastrous the MPAA rating system has become. How I Live Now, Kevin Macdonald’s stellar adaptation of Meg Rosoff’s uncommonly smart and insightful near-future young adult novel, has won an R rating. The film is apocalyptic in the most literal sense, as in, an apocalypse occurs, harrowing the characters…
Besides its cast, a parade of Brit aces the likes of which we haven’t seen since the last episode of Wizard Boy Has a Sad, the quality that most distinguishes Mike Newell’s adaptation of the best-titled of all English novels is its healthy fullness. In the decades since David Lean’s…
It’s almost a relief that Ender’s Game turned out to be a glum bore onscreen, a far-future cadets-in-space military drama whose pretensions to moral inquiry boil down to the guilt a kid may feel after stepping on an anthill. If the film had turned out grand, like the best of…
The title All Is Lost promises despair, especially with Robert Redford looking so stolid and weathered and still-got-it golden on the poster. Could this near-silent, you-are-there survival story be another of Redford’s yawps of boomer gloom? Another complaint, like The Company You Keep, about the realization that the world we…
I’m pretty sure the dumbest way to die is killing yourself upon discovering that faking your own death has tricked your forbidden lover into his or her own suicide. The second might be to get gutted in one of the jumbled, perfunctory sword fights that clang up the streets of…
Perhaps the best and worst thing about young teenagers is that they’re capable of what George W. Bush fans used to call “great moral clarity.” In HBO’s sure-to-make-you-bawl documentary Valentine Road, Aliyah, a student at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California, breaks down the differences between gayness and…
Like all kid protagonists in movies, Wadjda’s Wadjda wants one pure thing so much that the very concept of want shades into need. If this plucky Saudi Arabian girl (played by preteen Waad Mohammed) doesn’t get a bicycle, it seems, some fundamental quality of hers might not survive adolescence. Her…
With so many violent movies and lurid movies and straight-up bad movies — most just so much murderous product — it’s rare anymore to be seized by that feeling, as a film plays, that maybe there’s a reason for this particular violent or lurid or bad movie to exist. They…
“If they made a movie, Holden wouldn’t like it,” Martin Sheen opines deep into the new documentary Salinger. He’s speaking of the possibility of a film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, a disastrous idea that J.D. Salinger prevented in both life and death. Sheen could be talking about…
It’s a weird miracle that Johnny Cash and his primitive twosome banged out music that still feels so full and vital today. And it’s a weird miracle that My Father and the Man in Black is itself full and vital, despite throwing off all sorts of vanity-project warning signs: It’s…
Your life surges ahead as it is, pretty much, but maybe tinted blue. Maybe everything around you is tilted a bit, and strips of light glow on the wall, like an SUV with its brights on is idling on a ramp facing your window blinds. Your world looks not like…
The most revealing film ever made about kids and the appeal of violent fantasy isn’t Battle Royale or an adaptation of Lord of the Flies. It’s the shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark that a couple of Mississippi buddies put together over the course of their adolescence. Every…
No human has left near-Earth orbit since 1972, we’re reminded in Europa Report, a smartly marketed space-horror quickie that purports to be the one-giant-leap for found-footage scares — and also maybe Serious Space-Travel Movies themselves, which have failed to soar past our atmosphere almost as long as NASA has. To…
Since it’s called Austenland, and since it’s a romantic comedy, you probably expect it to open with “It’s a truth universally acknowledged” and to wrap with one lovesick sap madly dashing after another, right up to an airport’s departure gates, even though both presumably have cell phones and could just…
Despite the giddy, gory ridiculousness of Kick-Ass 2, this summer’s most violent yet least punishing comic-book movie, there’s a kernel of ugly human truth at the core of the Kick-Ass fantasy. In the first issue of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass comic, from 2008, a lonely high school…
Here’s a humble wig-out, a curio that could endure beyond its creators’ more demonstrably successful works — and for decades will certainly confound audiences who think they’re streaming/torrenting/eye-jacking some broad Paul Rudd comedy they had forgotten about. Prince Avalanche director David Gordon Green gives star Rudd more chances to charm…
Here’s something you would think we could all agree on: Rigid parts of the body probably shouldn’t go slack. But try asking a SeaWorld spokesperson about the drooping dorsal fins on so many of the park chain’s performing male orca, about that mighty Alfalfa spike that in the wild juts…
