Lowest Common Denominator-ism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared,…
Jafar Panahi is a paradoxical populist. He makes crowd-pleasing art movies, often set in the midst of life — the urban crowd is one of his subjects — and is a virtuoso director of (non) actors. On the other hand, this most widely seen of Iranian filmmakers is also the…
Holland’s gift to world cinema, Paul Verhoeven, can be a very bad boy and a very good filmmaker. Any of his movies could have been titled Basic Instinct — not least his epic World War II thriller Black Book, in which a Jewish chanteuse who watched her family be massacred…
The Good German, directed by Steven Soderbergh from Joseph Kanon’s best seller, is as much simulation as movie. Specifically, it’s the simulation of a 1940s private eye flick. It’s not just a period film, but one that feigns being shot as it would have been in that period. Filmed for…
New-school genre junk food: Take a Tarantino wanna-be with Sundance credentials, add a large, famous-enough cast and a show-biz backdrop, season the violence with references to Sergio Leone and Takeshi Kitano, serve cool, and garnish with a cynicism beyond irony. Smokin’ Aces is writer-director Joe Carnahan’s third and most elaborate…
Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth is something alchemical. To an astonishing degree, the 42-year-old Mexican filmmaker best known for his contribution to the Blade and Hellboy franchises has transformed the horror of mid-20th-century European history into a boldly fanciful example of what surrealists would call le…
History repeats itself: 11 Decembers ago, Universal had the season’s strongest movie — a downbeat sci-fi flick freely adapted from a well-known source by a name director. With a bare minimum of advance screenings and a shocking absence of hype, the studio dumped it. This year, it’s done it again…
Apocalypto has a faux Greek title and an opening quote from historian Will Durant that ruminates on the decline of imperial Rome. It may seem an odd way to comment on the supposed end of an imaginary, unspeakably barbaric Mayan civilization — but WWJD? Mel Gibson means to be universal…
A dozen years ago, Kelly Reichardt made her feature debut with a wonderfully desultory, nearly avant-garde riff on the last romantic couple. Reichardt’s River of Grass was a comic, slacker Bonnie and Clyde, set on the edge of the Everglades. Her belated follow-up, the more elegiac but no less site-specific…
Do artists actually see more than ordinary people? That’s what my high school art teacher thought. So, apparently, does Nicole Kidman — or at least that’s the way she plays Diane Arbus (1923-71) in the celebrated photographer’s exceedingly curious “imaginary portrait,” Fur. Kidman acted around a prosthetic proboscis to win…
Solemn, flashy, and flabbergasting, The Fountain — adapted by Darren Aronofsky from his own graphic novel — should really be called “The Shpritz.” The premise is lachrymose, the sets are clammy, and the metaphysics all wet. The screen is awash in spiraling nebulae and misty points of light, with the…
Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater from Eric Schlosser’s 2001 best-selling exposé of the McDonald’s conspiracy, is an anti-commercial. It’s designed to kill desire and deprogram the viewer’s appetite. Linklater — who, along with Steven Soderbergh and Gus Van Sant, has staked out a particular outpost on the indie-studio…
Manufactured history guarantees a manufactured controversy: Gabriel Range’s Death of a President, which docudramatizes the 2007 assassination of George W. Bush, has been preceded by a long, raucous fanfare. Excoriated on talk radio, damned as a snuff film, banned by two theater chains, the British production has also garnered celebrity…
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is funnier than its malapropistic title — the audience with whom I saw the movie wasn’t laughing so much as howling — and even more difficult to parse. Eyes wide, face fixed in an avid grin, Sacha Baron…
Drop-dead hip or cluelessly clueless? Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a candy-colored portrait of France’s infamous teen queen, is a graceful, charming, and sometimes witty confection — at least for its first hour. The famously shy Coppola may be an inscrutable personality, but her bold exposé of backstage royalty opens with…
The Queen is more fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It’s also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring. Directed by Stephen Frears from Peter Morgan’s script, The Queen is set in the peculiar…
Generic VH1 rock doc The U.S. vs. John Lennon is snazzy, mawkish, and practically Pavlovian in recycling all requisite late-’60s images. Given its subject, though, this David Leaf-John Scheinfeld production is not only poignant but even topical. Once upon a time, in the summer of 1971, John Lennon and Yoko…
No studio director was a greater hero to the Hong Kong new wave than Martin Scorsese. John Woo dedicated The Killer to him; Wong Kar-wai modeled his first feature, As Tears Go By, after Mean Streets; Taxi Driver’s rain-slicked slo-mo urban stylistics worked their way into countless lesser HK films…
Sweet, crazy, and tinged with sadness, Michel Gondry’s new feature, The Science of Sleep, is a wondrous concoction. The tricksy romantic narrative — in which Gael García Bernal plays a hapless, Chaplinesque madman — may be reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Gondry directed from Charlie Kaufman’s…
Directed by Brian De Palma from the novel by neo-noirist James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia is a true-crime policier unfolding in late-’40s Los Angeles somewhere between the neighborhoods of Chinatown and Mulholland Drive. The premise involves one of L.A.’s most notorious unsolved homicides. In early 1947, the naked corpse of…
If Superman Returns attempted to resurrect the Man of Steel as mythic hero, the season’s other Superman movie wants to disabuse us of any such childish illusions. Glamorously adult, Hollywoodland purports to part the veil on the circumstances by which George Reeves, the actor who embodied the superhero on ’50s…
Wanna knock the prez? Let’s make a show . . . preferably on television. Paul Weitz’s new satire American Dreamz imagines the Bush regime as an episode in the history of American entertainment and American Idol as the quintessence of U.S. democracy. So what else is new? The vision of…
