It’s one of the most cherished legends of the American indie: A socially retarded ugly duck, despite making no effort to regulate his glaring emotional hang-ups, is discovered as a swan by a clearly out-of-his-league girl who loves him just the way he is. Buffalo ’66 (1999) and Punch-Drunk Love…
Christopher Nolan’s ponderous, pontifical action movies are written less as screenplays than as operator’s manuals, guiding an audience through assembling their important themes while scrupulously making sure you don’t miss a thing. This is as true of Inception, with its reams of expositional walk-through, as of Nolan’s superhero saga, now…
Rock of Ages, a new star-clogged pop-musical diversion, is a cinematic event. It’s not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions — guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater — so thoroughly, mutually degraded. This mess originated as a stage production, first…
Arriving in theaters on the back of a portentous ad campaign, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus assumes the air of something more than a summer movie, a blockbuster with brains that links the genesis and the ultimate fate of mankind beyond the stars. It is, incidentally, the story of an ambitious mission…
If ever there was a perfect example of pure, fresh, classical simplicity unnecessarily trodden under with complications, it is Snow White and the Huntsman. Had it trusted by the native charm of its cast and the sensory seduction of its often-astonishing images to humbly, naively retell its story, this Snow…
Can any one of the millions of Americans who saw Men in Black 2 in 2002 describe its plot today? A single scene? I saw both MIB movies upon their original release and have as little memory of the experience as if I’d been mind-wiped with one of those “neuralyzing”…
Richard Linklater’s Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals with the murder of an 81-year-old woman in a fashion that is not exactly tragic. But unlike most movies that fall under that label, it never indulges…
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so utterly shameless that it achieves a certain grandeur. Peter Berg’s Battleship, which, I swear to God, is described in its Wikipedia entry as an “American science fiction action naval war film,” is one such movie. Over the past few…
Frank (Joel Murray) is an outcast. We first meet this divorced, 50-ish, glumly alcoholic white-collar worker — the protagonist of Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America — on one of his sleepless nights, entertaining homicidal fantasies about the couple next door. “They’re incapable of comprehending that their actions affect other people,”…
Much of Tim Burton’s output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the “Burton treatment” to susceptible texts: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — and now, Dark Shadows. A supernaturally themed daily daytime soap, Dark Shadows…
The Deep Blue Sea, the first fiction feature in a dozen years from visionary British director Terence Davies, is a film about love that in no way reassures that love conquers all. Plumbing disquieting depth, Deep Blue Sea investigates the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to experience,…
With The Deep Blue Sea, the great British director Terence Davies returns to the post-war period — though in a sense, he has never left. The cinema of Davies (born in 1945) is defined by a mixed pity and fondness for the world of yesterday, a past he seemingly finds…
A historical romance with a then-unheard-of price tag, James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic was the nearest thing to a Gone With the Wind-style cinematic event that the millennials could call their own. Now Titanic has bobbed to the surface yet again in a 3-D re-release, making a play for an audience…
The foundations of Silent House are laid atop La Casa Muda, a nil-budget 2010 Uruguayan horror film that enjoyed an afterlife in international film festivals. It is not surprising that La Casa Muda was hastily snapped up for an English-language remake, for the concept is the sort of low-overhead, trend-conscious…
Act of Valor is, according to the opening titles, “based on real acts of valor,” whatever that means. It stars real active-duty Navy SEALs, and, as the uniformed representative of the New York Coast Guard, 9th Regiment who introduced my screening explained, much of it was filmed with live-fire ammunition…
“There’s no one way to live our lives,” hopes the displaced, adrift couple at the center of Wanderlust. Shopping between the prefab identity options available to them — squeezed, stressed urban professionalism, suburban McMansion soul death, rural counterculture opting out — George and Linda (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) are…
Hostilities in This Means War are declared as two workmates compete for the affection of the same woman. The contested objective is Lauren (Reese Witherspoon), a product tester who decides to apply comparative shopping techniques to dating. Her would-be beaus, FDR (Chris Pine) and Tuck (Tom Hardy), are best friends…
The Vow, a full-bodied lunge for the heartstrings, has a humdinger of a premise, forcing its characters to face a question that most of us ask ourselves: If you could do the past five years over again, would you live them the same or take a mulligan? A young, married…
There’s a point in Haywire when the film’s protagonist, ex-Marine Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), gone rogue from her job as hired muscle for a private government subcontractor, takes a fall while scaling down a drainpipe and hits the ground with a crunch that knocks the wind out of you. It’s…
Director Stephen Daldry has never met a Big Theme he didn’t like: After 2002’s The Hours, a lugubrious women’s-problem picture touching on AIDS and assisted suicide, he went to Auschwitz with 2008’s The Reader. Following two such high-toned literary adaptations with such hefty subject matter, Daldry’s logical next stop is…
Will there someday be a movie where the “one last job” goes off without a hitch? Not Contraband, anyway, which begins with that time-tested premise, then subjects its protagonist to a feature-length demonstration of Murphy’s Law. Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) is the retiree runner reluctantly reactivated, a legend who once…
For 15 years and now four sequels, Tom Cruise has pilgrimaged regularly to the Mission: Impossible franchise. Like a Hindu’s rejuvenating bath in the Ganges, a dip in the series serves to wash away perceived doubts about the star’s enduring fame and clout. The sustained box office of the M:I…
