Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass has plenty of fans — it copped an award at Cannes in 2009 — but I don’t see what they see. The 87-year-old filmmaker’s latest is an insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault. Adapted from a novel by Christian Gailly,…
Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist. It does this in part by creating a romantic triangle between a longstanding, devoutly bourgeois lesbian couple, Nic and…
Opening with a close-up of the crow’s feet around its subject’s eyes and expanding to reveal her Botox-frozen upper lip, the documentary-portrait Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work celebrates Saint Joan the Resilient, Showbiz Survivor. Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg dogged the indomitable stand-up comic throughout the course of her…
Sad, funny, and acutely self-conscious, Noah Baumbach’s new movie is the sort of mordant character study that people imagine were common in the ’70s. Greenberg is unafraid to project a downbeat worldview or feature an impossible protagonist — I’d be hard put to name one as maddening as the eponymous…
Better late than never — a bang-bang pulse-pounder predicated on the Bush administration’s deliberate fabrication of WMD in Iraq. Paul Greengrass’ expertly assembled Green Zone has evidently been parked for some time on Universal’s shelf. Had the movie been released during the 2008 election season, it might have been something…
Walt Disney mulled an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for decades before producing an animated feature in 1951, although by all accounts, he didn’t much care for the prim little protagonist, let alone her supporting cast of “weird characters.” One wonders what Uncle Walt would have made of his studio’s…
The White Ribbon is Michael Haneke’s first German-language film since the original Funny Games (1997) and, addressing what used to be called “the German problem” while dodging the filmmaker’s own likeability issues, it’s his best ever. A period piece set on the eve of World War I in an echt…
A one-film cabinet of curiosities, The Lovely Bones turns the most successful CGI director of the ’00s loose on one of the decade’s prime literary phenomena: Cults collide as Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson tackles Alice Sebold’s bestselling New Age gothic, the story of a rape-murder-dismemberment and its aftermath,…
Looking back on a decade dominated by the movie franchise — Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Spider-Man, to name just a few — and overrun with prequels and sequels (Saw I, Saw II, Saw III, Saw . . .), each of our three critics picks three…
The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron’s mega-3D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and, like the Hope Diamond waved in front of your nose, the bling is almost blinding. For the first 45 minutes, I’m thinking: Metropolis! — and wondering how to amend ballots already cast in polls of…
The most significant American artist before Andy Warhol to take “the media” as his medium, Orson Welles lives on not only in posthumously restored director’s cuts of his movies but as a character in other people’s novels, plays, and movies — notably Richard Linklater’s deft, affectionate, and unexpectedly enjoyable Me…
The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem — in which a father and his 10-year-old son traverse a despoiled landscape of unspeakable horror — was a quick, lacerating read. John Hillcoat’s adaptation, which arrives one Thanksgiving past its original release date is, by contrast, a long, dull…
Historical cataclysm produces conspiratorial thinking: Germany’s loss in World War I, the JFK assassination, and 9/11 are all naturally understood as the stuff of unimaginable plots, unspeakable cover-ups, and unseen forces. The guys who made The Men Who Stare at Goats can’t quite decide whether this syndrome is risible or…
Directed by Spike Jonze from a 400-word children’s picture book published in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are may be the toughest adaptation since Tim Burton fashioned Mars Attacks! from a series of bubblegum cards. Tougher, actually: Burton was working with ephemeral, anonymous trash; Jonze is elaborating on a classic…
Set in the bucolic suburbs of early-19th-century London, as fresh and dewy as a newly mowed lawn, Jane Campion’s Bright Star recounts the love affair between a tubercular young poet and the fashionable teenager next door. It’s more conventionally romantic than wildly Romantic — but no less touching for that…
As Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola’s baroque genealogical melodrama, reaches its appropriately hysterical denouement, Vincent Gallo fixes his pale gaze on young co-star Alden Ehrenreich and reassures him, “It’s going to be okay; we’re a family.” Gallo’s warmth is not altogether convincing, but for writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de…
Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment — rich in fantasy and blithely amoral. It’s also quintessential Tarantino — even more drenched in film references than in gore, with a proudly misspelled title (lifted from Italian genre-meister Enzo Castellari’s 1978 Dirty Dozen knockoff) to…
Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess that they’re too tired to procreate that night and then confess their mutual relief. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2 a.m…
“Heterosexuals can’t understand camp because everything they do is camp,” opined an associate of the old Playhouse of the Ridiculous, a New York theater known for its good-natured, anarchic sexual farce — a piece like Turds in Hell, which offered a farrago of sodomy, sadomasochism, incest, coprophagia, bestiality, homosexual behavior…
Character is destiny — at least for Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. Allen’s exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia opens with a snatch of Groucho Marx singing his trademark paradoxical assertion (“Hello, I must be going”) and is powered almost entirely by the presence of a single, larger-than-life, and less than likeable,…
Not quite The Further Adventures of Cain & Abel, the second coming of Beavis & Butt-Head, King Kong vs. Godzilla Redux, or Peyton Meets Eli, but energetic fun nonetheless, Rudo y Cursi is a multiple brother act: It’s written and directed by Carlos Cuarón and produced by elder sibling Alfonso,…
Pundits agree: The 2008 election has finally and forever rung down the curtain on America’s longest-running psychodrama, namely the Boomerography, a.k.a. the ’60s. The long, strange trip is finally over. Still, a few stories remain to be told or retold. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 marks a particular 40th anniversary —…
