In Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tilda Swinton lives out an urban bohemian’s worst nightmare. Forced to give up her independence (and downtown loft) when a reckless night with schlubby photographer flame Franklin (John C. Reilly) results in accidental pregnancy, free-spirit travel writer Eva becomes an unhappy…
The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher as victimized woman In the first scene of The Iron Lady, which re-teams director Phyllida Lloyd with her Mamma Mia! star Meryl Streep, 80-something Margaret Thatcher is presented as a little old lady unfit for the fast-moving world outside her hermetic London townhouse. The bulk…
It’s 1992 at the start of In the Land of Blood and Honey, and Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) and Danijel (Goran Kostic) are about to hook up at Bosnian nightclub when they’re interrupted by a bomb blast. A few months later, Ajla is one of dozens of women rounded up and…
We know — you’re excited about The Dark Knight Rises. And The Avengers. And The Hunger Games. So are we. We’re also excited about a lot of other movies whose marketing campaigns have not inundated us with white noise (yet). Allow us to suggest a few more films to put…
We know — you’re excited about The Dark Knight Rises. And The Avengers. And The Hunger Games. So are we. We’re also excited about a lot of other movies whose marketing campaigns have not inundated us with white noise (yet). Allow us to suggest a few more films to put…
Margaret, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me), starring Anna Paquin with key supporting performances from Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo, is the best film of 2011. Chances are very, very good that you haven’t seen it — or were even aware that it was something…
We get the escapism we deserve, I guess: Just as 1930s Hollywood distracted Depression-era audiences with glitzy Fred and Ginger musicals, Harvey Weinstein is answering our Occupy-preoccupied times by releasing two Oscar hopeful fantasies in the same week. Both present the sad lives of Old Hollywood stars, but the soft…
Martin Scorsese’s first foray into big-budget family filmmaking — as well as his inaugural effort in 3-D — Hugo is a personal statement disguised as a sellout. Based on Brian Selznick’s 2007 kids’ book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo centers on its title character, played by Asa Butterfield, a…
The morality of the mad-scientist tale has remained more or less fixed since the beginning of sound cinema: From Dr. Frankenstein’s hubristic claim to “know what it feels like to be God,” to Jurassic Park’s criticism of “scientists [who] were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop…
In hindsight, the 1984 hit Footloose — starring Kevin Bacon and directed by Herbert Ross — along with its contemporary Flashdance, can be seen as the link between the old Hollywood model of a let’s-put-on-a-show musical, based on original songs brought to life in elaborate choreographed numbers, and the later…
A procedural on the political manipulation of medium and message, George Clooney’s fourth directorial effort is bookended with scenes of media-op prepping. In the first, Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), a 30-year-old campaign adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Mike Morris (Clooney), fills in for his boss at the sound check for…
When Albert Brooks greets me in the reception area of his Beverly Hills office, I immediately recognize his shirt. The baggy, faded, red short-sleeve button-down imprinted with dull green palm trees belongs to the inimitably tacky wardrobe of Bernie Rose, the mobster and sometime B-movie producer Brooks plays in Nicolas…
Currently the fifth-to-last film on Steven Soderbergh’s ever-expanding pre-retirement slate, Contagion opens on day two of a global viral epidemic. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Beth Emhoff, an American employee for an ominously unspecific multinational corporation who returns from a business trip in Hong Kong to her wintry Midwestern home feeling like…
In Jesse Peretz’s Our Idiot Brother, Paul Rudd plays Ned, a kind of Upstate New York version of “The Dude” Lebowski — a man out of time, blinkered enough to be living the hippie dream. In the film’s first scene, Ned is “entrapped” into selling pot at a farmers market…
Directed by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig from a screenplay by David Nicholls, based on his novel, One Day stars Anne Hathaway as Emma, a too-serious would-be writer in coke-bottle glasses and combat boots. She’s nursing a crush on Dexter (Jim Sturgess), her too-good-looking rich boy college classmate. She’s earnest, tenacious…
More than just the Hollywood It Girl of the moment, Emma Stone is a real actress, and in The Help, she gets an ostentatious, Oscar-baiting Big Scene in which to prove it. Stone is, to borrow a phrase from Bret Easton Ellis’ Twitter account, thoroughly post-empire — she doesn’t need…
There may be nothing as Old Hollywood as the narrative about a pretty girl summoning up a dose of pluck to triumph over adversity. And yet Brit Marling — the lithe, stunning co-writer and star of 2011 Sundance Film Festival hits Another Earth and Sound of My Voice, who gives…
A uniquely Freudian entry in the body-switching comedy canon, The Change-Up stars Jason Bateman as standard issue anal-retentive lawyer/family man Dave, and Ryan Reynolds as Dave’s classically anal-expulsive stoner/playboy childhood friend Mitch. When sober, Dave begrudgingly tolerates Mitch’s wild-animal routine. One night, when both are drunk, Dave admits he’s secretly…
Phillip Morris directors fall short of their own high bar with Crazy, Stupid, Love. In the first scene of Crazy, Stupid, Love, Emily (Julianne Moore) tells Cal (Steve Carell), her high school sweetheart and husband of 20-plus years, that she wants a divorce. She goes on to mention that she…
Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics in 1941, Captain America was among the first American comic books intended as an explicit work of patriotic, political propaganda: The cover of the debut issue, available months before Pearl Harbor, famously featured the titular costume hero punching out Adolf…
There’s a scene in Horrible Bosses in which Jennifer Aniston, playing a dentist who habitually sexually harasses her weakling male hygienist (Charlie Day), repeatedly says the word “pussy.” Her character is trying to intimidate his, while the filmmakers attempt to shock the audience with the spectacle of this lady rom-com…
“Okay, so my parents were married in 1955, and my mom knew my dad was gay, and my dad knew he was gay, and so I was, like, ‘Why in the heck did you get married?’ Like, what was going on? What was that time? It’s like this crazy paradox…
