CANNES, France — Memorable for its in-your-face sensationalism, the 62nd Cannes Film Festival opened with the 3-D computer animation Up, saving the “Yours” for the final minutes of the competition’s penultimate movie, Gaspar Noé’s “psychedelic melodrama” Enter the Void. The sad, tawdry, monstrously inflated tale of two traumatized club kids…
Jim Jarmusch’s anonymous antihero hitman (French-Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé), identified in the credits of The Limits of Control as the Lone Man, exists only in terms of his unspecified mission. The Lone Man is introduced in an overhead shot doing tai chi in an airport toilet stall, then taking…
“Things,” as Dwight D. Eisenhower once observed, “are more like they are now than they have ever been before.” But why? Is something better possible? Could there be another way of looking at life — or movies? Ideas beam out from Astra Taylor’s engaging new philoso-doc Examined Life; the viewer…
Kevin Macdonald’s Washington thriller is a bellows designed to puff up the most beaten-down reporter’s chest. Compressed from the highly regarded BBC miniseries first telecast in 2003, State of Play is an effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer. There are more than a few…
Martin Scorsese may be presenting Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, but this corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like Mean Streets cubed. Detailing daily life inside a criminal state, it’s a new sort of gangster film for America to ponder. Gomorrah takes its punning…
The most eagerly anticipated (as well as the most beleaguered) movie of the year (if not the century), Watchmen is neither disastrous desecration nor total triumph. In filming David Hayter and Alex Tse’s adaptation of the most ambitious superhero comic book ever written, director Zack Snyder has managed to address…
Sometimes, less really is more. Modest but cosmic, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy is a movie whose sad pixie heroine, Wendy (Michelle Williams), already skating on thin ice, stumbles and, without a single support to brace herself, slides into America’s lower depths. Introduced calling for her dog, Lucy, Wendy loses…
And so the endless campaign wraps up with a flurry of virtual leaders. Richard Nixon will always be part of America’s dreamlife, with or without David Frost; the Bush II legacy will linger for years, even as W. addresses a yearning for closure. Like our president-elect, Milk arrives from left…
Ari Folman’s broodingly original Waltz with Bashir is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature. Folman, whose magic realist youth film Saint Clara was one of the outstanding Israeli films of the 1990s, has created a grim, deeply personal phantasmagoria around the 1982…
The Wrestler may be plenty visceral, but it’s no more a sports movie than professional wrestling is a competitive sport. Chronic over-reacher Darren Aronofsky’s relatively unpretentious follow-up to the ridiculous debacle that was The Fountain is all about showbiz. It’s also a canny example. You want to make a comeback…
I hear America singing and I see . . . Richard Nixon. Not the man but the muse: Has any president since Lincoln inspired more movies, TV mini-series, and operas? As Nixon’s beetle brows, ski nose, and mirthless grin were made for caricature, so his rampant pathology was a gift…
Gus Van Sant has never been what you’d call a risk-averse filmmaker, but he directs his Harvey Milk biopic so carefully that there could be a Ming vase balanced on his head. Van Sant’s steps are deliberate, his posture is straight, his attitude is responsible, and his eyes are fixed…
In a nation of frightened dullards, there is always a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome.” So wrote Hunter S. Thompson of the Hells Angels after riding with California’s motor-psycho Mongol hordes in the mid-1960s, a feat of embedded journalism that left…
The protag of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a modestly gaudy people’s heroine industriously repairing the social world, one frayed interaction at a time. After extended cameos in two previous Leigh films (as a resourceful pop tart in All or Nothing and the date-raped rich girl in Vera Drake), fine-boned Sally…
W. may be less frenzied than the usual Oliver Stone sensory bombardment, but in revisiting the early ’00s by way of the late ’60s, this psycho-historical portrait of George W. Bush has all the queasy appeal of a strychnine-laced acid flashback. Hideous re-creations of the shock-and-awful recent past merge with…
Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on flippancy. Given their refusal to take anything seriously — least of all the enthusiasm of their fans — the brothers surely got a chuckle from an upcoming academic tome, The Philosophy of the Coen…
Some say the world will end in fire; some — like Werner Herzog — say ice. Flying in the face of global warming, this profoundly idiosyncratic filmmaker leads an expedition, alternately comic and visionary, to the heart of coldness. Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World chronicles his trip…
As old Broadway shows are revived, new Broadway shows are spun from old movies so that new movies may be fashioned from ancient TV series. It’s an iron law of the culture industry that turns out to be a pleasant surprise in the case of Get Smart, the late-’60s sitcom…
It’s been 20 years since Errol Morris made The Thin Blue Line — a found “noir” that served to free an innocent man convicted of murder. Gathering evidence and dramatizing testimony, Morris’s movie circled around a single, unrepresentable event — the death of a cop on a lonely stretch of…
CANNES, France — The competition for the Palme d’Or is ongoing as I write, yet the red carpet has been rolled up as you read. You will know, as I can’t, whether my comrade journalists agree that the second-week story of the 61st Cannes Film Festival is Steven Soderbergh’s two-part…
CANNES, France—Wading through 20-odd movies in half as many languages, each Cannes jury supplies its own dramatic narrative, to be interpreted according to its president’s presumed taste. Days before the 61st Cannes Film Festival ended, rumors were rife that the jury was having difficulties reaching consensus. As the award ceremony…
CANNES, France—The competition for the Palme d’Or is ongoing as I write, but the story of the 61st Cannes Film Festival is Steven Soderbergh’s two-part, four-and-a-half-hour Che—an epic non-biopic that might well have been approved by Roberto Rossellini, envied by Francis Coppola, and even appreciated by its subject. (And the…
