“My son is sick right now, covered in zits. It’s not contagious — I mean, it’s contagious, but don’t worry: Grownups don’t catch it. It’s called mouth-foot-and-butt disease or something.” Julie Delpy materializes on the patio of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont on a wave of nervous energy. Hair pinned up away…
In Celeste and Jesse Forever, the titular, newly separated female protagonist’s un-flamboyant queer co-worker (Elijah Wood) tells her “it’s time get your fuck on,” and then apologizes: “Sorry, I was trying to be your saucy gay friend.” Co-written by and starring Parks and Rec’s Rashida Jones, Forever is a notably…
“I don’t want to give you lessons in self-denial and social responsibility,” an art dealer tells her billionaire boy client in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, by way of refusing to entertain his demand to buy the Rothko Chapel. “Because I don’t believe for a second you’re as crude as you sound.”…
Chinese artist, activist, and antagonist Ai Weiwei became a worldwide cause célèbre last April when he was arrested by authorities at the Beijing Airport, detained in an undisclosed location for nearly three months, and released after allegedly confessing to tax evasion. The Sundance-feted documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry concludes shortly…
The Campaign begins with an on-screen quote attributed to Ross Perot: “War has rules. Mud wrestling has rules. Politics has no rules.” The Texas billionaire/private-campaign-financing pioneer dropped this truism not during his historic third-party run for the presidency in 1992, but in the midst of his far less-successful 1996 campaign…
From bubblegum-bi-curious novelty “I Kissed a Girl” on, Katy Perry has built a career on glorious brain-dead-with-a-wink odes to playacting in a fantasy space of total acceptance and no consequences, sold to children with literal sugarcoating. Her hits are powerful stuff, coming from an artist who was raised by Pentecostal…
“Welcome to the recession, boys,” says John Travolta’s DEA-double-agent profiteer in Oliver Stone’s Savages, based on Don Winslow’s novel. Savages is a movie of its moment, though both its good guys and bad guys (if there’s really even a difference) are unquestionably the 1 percent of their industry — that…
When Channing Tatum stood up and revealed his bare ass to the camera a minute or two into Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike — which the actor conceived of and produced based on his own experience as a teenage dancer in an all-male exotic revue — the audience in my screening…
With her high cheekbones, feline brown eyes, and heart-shaped mouth, actress Aubrey Plaza is bombshell hot. But in an unusual twist for a 20-something performer at the beginning of her career, Plaza’s natural foxiness is a resource that has gone largely unexploited. Not exactly a character actress, as she hasn’t…
It’s 1965, the rainy end of summer on the rocky coast of a fictional New England isle. Twelve-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman), a scrawny, bespectacled outcast with an unusual aptitude for cartography, disappears from the Khaki Scout camp, absconding with a couple of bedrolls and an air rifle, and leaving behind…
Twentysomething Silver Lake couple Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) talk their way into an unnamed cult that meets in the basement of a San Fernando Valley split-level in the middle of the night to follow the teachings of the enigmatic Maggie (Brit Marling). A supposedly sickly yet ethereally…
In his third collaboration with director Larry Charles, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the young, dumb dictator of fictional North African nation Wadiya. Under Aladeen’s rule, oil-producing, uranium-enriching Wadiya is a hostile threat to global peace and capitalism. And yet, Aladeen himself is so attracted to Western culture…
Bobcat Goldthwait is moving farther and farther away from Hollywood — the industry that paid him to star in three Police Academy movies and the geographical area of Los Angeles. Last week, he presented his new directorial effort, God Bless America, at a radio-station promo gig in Omaha and, a…
At the start of Joss Whedon’s long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick, The Avengers, the Tesseract — a powerful, potentially dangerous glowing cube that fell to the ocean floor after Captain America (Chris Evans) liberated it from the Nazis in his movie last summer — is in the hands of NASA…
Whit Stillman made a name for himself making semiautobiographical, deadpan, highly literate comedies about the night lives of idle heirs (his 1990 Oscar-nominated debut Metropolitan), privileged Americans abroad (Barcelona, 1994), and resilient yuppies in decadent early ’80s Manhattan (The Last Days of Disco, 1998). But for more than a decade,…
In 2010, the internationally celebrated Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was arrested at his home. A neorealist who has been a vocal opponent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime, Panahi was accused of “[participating] in a gathering and carrying out propaganda against the system,” sentenced to six years in prison, and banned from…
In the first scene of 2012 Israel’s Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee, Footnote, Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi) — a 40-something Talmudic scholar whose research has earned adulation while his 60-something father’s has mostly been ignored — accepts an honor with an obliviously glib speech built around a childhood anecdote about…
How did the Will Ferrell-in-Spanish movie ever get made? Casa de Mi Padre is a Spanish-language comedy starring Will Ferrell as a simpleminded, asexual Mexican cowboy who welcomes the return of his prodigal brother Raul (Diego Luna) to the family ranch but eyes Raul’s beautiful fiancée with suspicion. The movie…
Written and directed by Paul Weitz, Being Flynn is an adaptation of Nick Flynn’s 2004 memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which explored the author’s pivotal experience working at the Boston homeless shelter where his down-and-out dad, Jonathan, was a frequent guest. In the movie, Paul Dano and Robert…
Directed by Oren Moverman (The Messenger) from a script by Moverman and L.A. noir master James Ellroy, Rampart tracks the downward spiral of LAPD cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson). A Vietnam vet whose personal code allows for extreme bad behavior in the name of a hazily defined greater good, Brown…
“He’s sooo hot,” the woman sitting next to me at the screening of Safe House sighed to her friend as the film’s opening images of Ryan Reynolds working out flashed on the screen. She then went on to fiddle with her BlackBerry for half the movie. Based on those two…
It’s potentially dangerous to look at the lineup of the Sundance Film Festival, which ended Sunday, as a reflection of the character of contemporary indie film, the collective American consciousness, or, well, anything. But there’s no question that the 2012 edition of the festival was stuffed with films in some…
