You don’t have to have been raised on colonial Brit Lit, classic melodramas, Westerns or war movies, or Gone With the Wind to figure out the likely outcome of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia within its first 15 minutes, but any or all of the above will help. Tightly wound and corseted…
I’m telling Danny Boyle over coffee that his new film, Slumdog Millionaire, is his best by far. “I hope it comes across that I had a real blast making it,” the British director murmurs politely. Either the coffee is over-caffeinated, or Boyle’s Lancashire friendliness disarms me, or I’ve had it…
With his blazing white coat and pig-pink ears, to say nothing of the zigzag of lightning cut into his flank, the eponymous canine lead of Disney’s lively new animated movie Bolt looks a little bit real and a whole lot not. That’s not a failure of craft: Goofy and sweet…
On a double bill with L.A. Confidential, Chinatown, or just about any film made after 1970 about institutional corruption in Los Angeles, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, a period drama based on a 1928 Los Angeles missing-child case, would come off as faintly geezer-ish noir lite. As LAPD scandals go, the case…
A young woman fights off her brutal husband; a gun goes off; a marble spins on the floor where a toddler sits unattended. From B-movie beginnings, The Secret Life of Bees, a family drama set in the civil rights-era South, chugs along pleasantly like a television special tailored for the…
Those who believe that Jonathan Demme went all soft with Philadelphia and never recovered may not be reassured by his latest movie, an ensemble tale of family pathology gussied up with vérité camera work, world music, and improvising actors both trained and not. You can find the worst and the…
The Duchess is the best women’s movie of the past few months. Don’t get too excited: Sex and the City, Mamma Mia!, and The Women set the bar so dismally low that almost any film with a dame in it who doesn’t channel her identity only through buying, boogieing, and/or…
“What do you think this is?” cries a lady who lunches in Diane English’s remake of George Cukor’s The Women. “Some kind of ’30s movie?” Even without the 14-year struggle to get the Murphy Brown writer’s pet project past studio doubters, it would be a tall order to remake George…
When I’d heard that Quentin Tarantino handed the Grand Jury Prize for best feature to Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, telling the audience that the movie “put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame,” my jaw went…
Making notes in 1949 for a review of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell wrote, “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be . . . while holding untenable opinions.” That’s a nice way of saying that Waugh, a world-class satirist of everyone from the rich down,…
Notwithstanding all the pundit-driven hot air about the horrors of being young in today’s America, I’m willing to buy the argument that it’s getting harder to survive those years, if only because there’s so much more for the poor dears to worry about — more information, more technology, more stuff…
I’ve always enjoyed ABBA — not in that post-hoc, so-bad-it’s-good way, but innocently, the way I like Phil Spector. To this day, howling along in my car to that echoing, cascading, multiply overdubbed wall of sound makes me feel like a member of some dippy but joyous cathedral choir. So…
In Kit Kittredge, all it takes to cure the Depression is a little Miss Sunshine. To my 10-year-old daughter, the term “American Girl” means “that store my meanie of a mom — unlike all the other, higher-quality moms — won’t let me go near.” Why should I? She hates dolls,…
Just over a decade ago, Russian director Sergei Bodrov made his mark on the West with his Academy Award-nominated movie Prisoner of the Mountains, which transplanted a Tolstoy novella for children to Russia’s war with Chechnya. Though Prisoner seemed an unlikely calling card for Hollywood, its blend of commercial technique…
In “Fatso,” a short story by Israeli writer Etgar Keret, monogamy takes a bizarre vacation when the narrator’s pretty girlfriend morphs, every night, into a hairy, beer-guzzling macho soccer fanatic who takes her lover to steak restaurants and sleazy bars — an experience as unexpectedly delightful to him as the…
Behold Adam Sandler, in a passable Israeli accent and outsize codpiece, as Zohan the Mossad super-heavy: catching barbecued fish in his butt crack on a Tel Aviv beach, repelling bullets with his nostril, sculpting hand grenades into toy poodles for delighted Palestinian children while making mincemeat of an Arab terrorist…
Oh, please — spoiler alert? Fine, I won’t tell you whether Carrie Bradshaw ties the knot with Mr. Big, even though you’ve already seen that gown winging its way around the Web. Given the Sex and the City vibe, some fans might be more interested in whether the frock —…
“Things never happen the same way twice.” Thus boometh Aslan the lion (Liam Neeson), alias the Son of God, popping his computer-generated shaggy head briefly into The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian to pep-talk a bunch of discouraged Brits into fighting the good fight again. As in life, so in…
Canadian poet Anne Michaels’ beautiful 1996 novel, Fugitive Pieces — about a Jewish writer immobilized by the memory of his Polish family’s murder at the hands of the Nazis — distills tragedy into grief, terror, and a wary romance built on the redemptive power of love and art, and set…
Jon Avnet’s cheesy new thriller, 88 Minutes, is 105 minutes long. Going in, I feared that 100 of them would be eaten up by Al Pacino chewing the furniture. Alas, it’s worse than that. Pacino plays a Seattle forensic psychiatrist in symbiotic thrall to the serial killer he helped put…
Do we need another look back at the rotten heart of the ’50s nuclear family? Ira Sachs thinks we do, and as one who can’t get enough of sweaty melodramas about rotting families, I’m with him in principle. Mind you, Sachs’ new movie is less about families than about cheating…
Near the beginning of The Counterfeiters, a fact-based Holocaust drama by Austrian filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky, we meet Jewish money forger and former jailbird Salomon Sorowitsch (brilliantly played by Karl Markovics), packing to flee Berlin in 1936 with a suitcase full of fake money. We know from an opening coda that…
