David Chase looks like he wants to whack somebody. Not just anybody, mind you, but the middle-age guy with the bad dye job a few tables away from us in the Library Bar of the Regency Hotel. “Hiya!” bellows the dye job into his phone. “I’m sittin’ here watchin’ the…
“I’ve made six movies, and I feel like I’m only just finally figuring out how this business fucking works,” Paul Thomas Anderson says on an August afternoon in Queens, New York, where later that night he will preview his latest film. The movie is The Master, Anderson’s first in the…
It’s a warm spring evening on the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood, and the crowd jostling for hors d’oeuvres in the lobby of the Paramount Theater exudes the anticipatory hum of a gala studio première. Only tonight’s feature presentation isn’t a new summer blockbuster or year-end prestige release. Rather, it’s…
Looking back on a decade dominated by the movie franchise — Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Spider-Man, to name just a few — and overrun with prequels and sequels (Saw I, Saw II, Saw III, Saw . . .), each of our three critics picks three…
On a late March morning, the sun sits high in the Cape Town sky, illuminating the trapezoidal monolith of Table Mountain in the distance, while down by the city’s busy waterfront, the players of South Africa’s national rugby union team — the Springboks — go for a training run. Only…
Tom Ford’s A Single Man: It’s better to look good than be good. Too much is never enough for fashion designer turned filmmaker Tom Ford, whose debut feature flaunts its capital-A artiness the way some Napoleonic gym rats flaunt their overdeveloped musculature. Unlike his fellow art-house Michael Bays — Julie…
Does Nancy Meyers hate women? The thought ran through my head not very long into It’s Complicated, Meyers’ biennial stocking-stuffer about the romantic trials and tribulations of obscenely privileged and narcissistic Southern Californians. Once more into the breach goes Meyers to show us what women really want, this time with…
Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Why? Because it’s thick with sludge. Moving briskly through a stranger-than-fiction, serpentine narrative that is still unfolding, Joe Berlinger’s remarkable documentary Crude recounts an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, back-room glad-handing, and bureaucratic dead ends that has, among other collateral…
Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but for the title character of the pitch-black Chilean comedy The Maid, it’s closer to an infernal torment. For more than 20 years, Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) has worked as the hired help for an upper-class Santiago family, the Valdezes, whom she has served with…
Given his preference for static, symmetrical, scrupulously color-coordinated and art-directed compositions, it’s less surprising that Wes Anderson has gotten around to directing an animated feature than that it took him this long to do it. Likewise, if Anderson — a nostalgia merchant whose ostensibly contemporary films always seem to be…
In her broad outlines, Claireece Precious Jones risks sounding like the epitome of ghetto cliché: an obese, illiterate 16-year-old; mother to a 4-year-old Down syndrome daughter and now pregnant again; physically and psychologically abused by her mother; repeatedly raped by her father, who is, also, the father of her own…
Early in Shane Acker’s computer-animated debut feature 9, a diminutive anthropomorphic whatsit with wooden hands, copper fingers, and the titular numeral emblazoned on his chest awakens to the lifeless body of his human creator and sets forth into a decimated industrial landscape — all twisted metal and smokestacks — that…
In the same week that the South African import District 9 gives us a Johannesburg beset by alien invaders, the latest film by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki envisions a small Japanese port town turned upside down by visitors from the bottom of the sea. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s…
The aliens have been with us already for 20 years at the start of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mothership and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the space…
After devoting his first two films as director, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, to getting laid and having kids, respectively, Judd Apatow brings the circle of life to a close with Funny People, which stars Adam Sandler as George Simmons, a popular, Sandler-esque movie star diagnosed with a rare…
Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering…
Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S…
“They’re all about where people come from. Nobody seems to wonder where somebody’s going.” So says the Depression-era bank-robber-cum-folk-hero John Dillinger upon surveying the clientele of a chic Chicago eatery in a key scene from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. And, much like its subject, Mann’s exhilarating movie exists in a…
Midway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers’ solipsistic, terminally-apologetic-for-being-solipsistic portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-slacker-messiah, the author, upon interviewing to become a cast member of MTV’s The Real World, makes the following observation about his generation of self-obsessed, media-savvy technobrats: “These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational,…
At 73, the Memphis-born actor, stuntman, former U.S. Marine, and Golden Gloves boxer Red West has the stoic, leathery repose of a barfly on a John Ford or Howard Hawks saloon wall. He doesn’t talk much, and when he does, reveals even less, but there’s an abyss of longing and…
This much is for sure about the makers of the new Zac Efron picture 17 Again: They know their audience. Scientifically engineered for maximum shriek-and-squeal value among Efron’s legion of distaff tween fans (and no small number of lonely-heart cougars and gay men), the movie opens on His Zackness’ sweaty,…
Set a mere two decades ago, Greg Mottola’s Adventureland seems as if it could be taking place on a distant planet, less for the leg warmers and knee socks clinging to lower extremities than for the legions of pre-Internet Luddites who gather, like the apes at the start of 2001,…
