Fueled by impotent, blustery outrage, Adam McKay’s The Big Short, about the grotesque banking and investing practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is about as fun and enlightening as a cranked-up portfolio manager’s rue-filled comedown after an energy-shot bender. Based on Michael Lewis’ 2010 bestselling book of the…
New York has often been the setting for films about heroin addicts, with titles ranging from Shirley Clarke’s cinéma-vérité-tweaking The Connection (1961) to Slava Tsukerman’s new-wave cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) mining the drama of smack freaks tying off, shooting up, and nodding out. But Josh and Benny Safdie’s tough,…
“After 40, you have to choose between your ass or your face,” one offscreen spin-class participant remarks to her fellow affluent fitness enthusiasts within the first minute of writer-director Stacie Passon’s poorly conceived Concussion. The remark is a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Catherine Deneuve, and the first of…
If Side Effects, an immensely pleasurable thriller centering on psychotropic drugs, really is Steven Soderbergh’s final big-screen film, as the director claims it will be, then he has peaked in the Valley of the Dolls. Scripted by Scott Z. Burns, who also wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), Side…
Set in East Germany in 1980, Christian Petzold’s superb Barbara is a transfixing Cold War thriller made even more vivid by its subtle overlay of the golden-era “woman’s picture,” the woman in question being Dr. Barbara Wolff, brilliantly played by Nina Hoss in her fifth film with the writer-director. Yet…
A chiller about two abandoned girls and their bond to the wraith of the title, Mama never delivers the primal terror its premise would suggest. Instead, the movie — the first feature by Andy Muschietti, who co-scripted with his sibling Barbara and Neil Cross — distracts with too much foolishness:…
Gay-male weepies have left a long trail of tears, stretching back to the sobbing, self-loathing queens of The Boys in the Band, released one year after the Stonewall insurrection of 1969, and including high-prestige pictures like Philadelphia (1993) and Brokeback Mountain (2005). The genre, most prominent during the first decade…
Most of the blathering this year about the death of film and film culture has already dissipated. But one gnomic pronouncement endures: Leos Carax describing cinema as “a beautiful island with a cemetery” following the world première of Holy Motors at Cannes. What are the contents of that necropolis? As…
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to watch Jacques Audiard’s outrageous melodrama Rust and Bone without laughing. Loosely adapted from two works in Craig Davidson’s 2005 short story collection of the same name, Rust and Bone finds Audiard returning to the overdetermined characters and swift…
A wan comedy about gambling that takes no risks, Stephen Frears’ Lay the Favorite has none of the stinging sordidness of The Grifters, his 1990 movie about chiselers and con artists. That tight, nimble adaptation of Jim Thompson’s high-pulp, strained-through, Greek-tragedy 1963 novel endures as the only other good film…
The winner of the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at Sundance, Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In, an occasionally muddled disquisition on the colossal failure of the war on drugs, rehashes much that will be familiar to even the most casual reader of newspapers: that this “war” is waged…
In anticipation of the remake of the 1976 girl-group melodrama Sparkle — Whitney Houston’s posthumous film appearance and her return to movies after a 15-year absence — we look back at the handful of celluloid performances by the woman once known as ” the Voice.” Houston’s pipes certainly get a…
In just two feature films, writer/director Joachim Trier has proved to be unparalleled in exposing the foibles and delusions of all the sad young literary men — or of one man in particular. The 20-something character played by Anders Danielsen Lie in Reprise (2006) finds immediate cult success with his…
A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth, and ecological parable, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the southern Louisiana-set debut feature of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, rests, often cloyingly, on the tiny shoulders of Quvenzhané Wallis. Her character, Hushpuppy, the film’s 6-year-old (also Wallis’ age during filming) protagonist and…
Like Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story (2010), Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War scathingly indicts U.S. military culture. Yet the focus of each documentary is vastly different in scale: one person as opposed to one gender. Bar-Lev examines the exploitation of the corpse of Pat Tillman, the highly principled pro footballer…
Beginning with a bilious toast and ending with a group hug, Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister, her fourth film, expertly makes us squirm for about half its running time only to soothe us with empty pop-psych declarations. In Shelton’s previous feature, the bolder Humpday, two straight guys, in a moment…
Fans of Seth MacFarlane’s Fox mainstay Family Guy who wish he would run afoul of FCC regulations every week might be pleased with Ted, the story of a 35-year-old man and his foul-talking teddy bear. Plushies, too, might be turned on by the pot-smoking, whore-banging CGI toy ursus of the…
With her flame-colored ringlets, Merida, the barely adolescent heroine of Pixar’s 13th feature, looks like a wee Rebekah Brooks, maybe a pint-size Florence Welch. Despite these resemblances, Merida remains an original: Brave, set in the Scottish Highlands in the 10th century, is the animation studio’s first film with a female…
Three generations of fine actresses are squandered in Bruce Beresford’s Peace, Love & Misunderstanding, an incompetently structured film that pits hippies against squares with the usual wearying results. This head-hammering, clash-of-values family-healing dramedy makes sure to literalize all its uplifting messages; gentle admonitions about “letting go” are immediately followed by…
I spotted a bottle of something called Marley’s Mellow Mood, “a new line of 100 percent natural relaxation beverages,” in my neighborhood deli just a few hours after seeing Kevin Macdonald’s documentary on the reggae and Rasta emissary — a reminder of just how crassly the Jamaican legend, who died…
“If no one watches, then they don’t have a game,” a teenager says in this faithful if cautious adaptation of the first volume of Suzanne Collins’ astronomically successful dystopic YA trilogy. A withering indictment of omnipresent screens, endless spectacle, and debased celebrity culture, The Hunger Games was inspired, the author…
Bro, how times have changed: 21 Jump Street is now a buddy comedy. The television show 21 Jump Street, about cops who go undercover as high-schoolers, debuted on Fox in 1987 — one year after the network debuted — and ran until 1991, launching the career of Johnny Depp (who…
