Beware the movie that’s Fun! with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters that say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you’ve always liked but perhaps haven’t…
Wish I Was Here, the movie that actor and second-time director Zach Braff partially funded with money raised through Kickstarter, isn’t nearly terrible enough to satisfy all the grumblers who are hoping to see it fail. When Braff couldn’t secure traditional financing for the film, he appealed to the fan…
The business of childhood is the business of waiting: waiting for Christmas, waiting for school to let out, waiting to be old enough to stay up past nine. No other movie I can think of better captures the wistfulness of those days full of waiting than Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, an…
Plays adapted into movies always feel naked by the time they make it to the screen, their theatrical bones showing through in a most awkward and unbecoming way. That’s more or less true of Roman Polanski’s screen version of David Ives’ Venus in Fur, in which a playwright and first-time…
Who knows why, but the sight of apes sitting tall and proud on horseback is stirring in a primal way. That’s one of the best images in Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the sequel to 2011’s enormously successful Rise of the Planet of the Apes (directed…
To call Roger Ebert one of the great populist film critics is to damn him with faint praise. Though he took pride in working for the scrappier of the two Chicago dailies, the Sun-Times, and though we do have him to thank — or curse — for popularizing the thumbs…
It’s kind of happy-sad, like watching a kid you knew as a toddler graduate from high school: Chris Evans, seemingly destined to be a boy forever, is now officially a grownup. In Bong Joon-ho’s futuristic snowbummer Snowpiercer, the Korean director’s first English-language film, Evans plays the leader of a group…
A truly punk act, a shout of freedom, frustration, and exaltation, hits about halfway through Lukas Moodysson’s girl-punk reverie We Are the Best! The three 13-year-old protagonists, high on the idea of the three-chord band they’ve just started, find some damp garbage bags on the street that, they discover, are…
If you ever have days when you prefer animals to human beings, How to Train Your Dragon 2 is your kind of movie. In some ways, the second entry in this animated franchise is inferior to the first, released in 2010: The plot is needlessly busy, and much of the…
Cancer, so costly in real life, can be thrown around pretty cheaply in fiction, which is why most cautious readers and moviegoers are wary of it as a plot element. Call it the Love Story syndrome. But the presence of mortal illness has always been a staple of romantic melodrama,…
One of the biggest selling points of 21 Jump Street, the 2012 TV-remake comedy, turned out to be its seemingly unscripted lunacy, the way it put Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill in police-shorts outfits and let them riff on their characters’ mutual ineptitude. Sometimes you need a little flapdoodle, and…
Remarkable as it seems, there’s still poetry to be found in the idea of kids tooling around with nothing much to do. Whether you grew up in a small town or a midsize-to-large city, in 1962, 1982, or 2002, you probably remember getting into a car, unwisely, with the first…
Greetings from Cannes! It’s an unwritten rule — maybe it should even be a written one — that no one who is lucky enough to come to Cannes for the film festival, now in its 67th year, should, in any way, shape, or form, complain about being here. But may…
In 2014, any filmmaker who has a feel, and a flair, for romantic melodrama is doomed, and just one recent example from the world of blockbusters suggests why: In the final moments of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the hero tragically fails to save a major character, but the moment, coming…
Godzilla is the movie monster with the mostest. King Kong may be just one gorilla-chest-hair behind, but not even the greatest of apes can quite match the half-dragon, half-dinosaur who first stomped and chomped his way through Tokyo in Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Toho Co, Ltd., extravaganza Godzilla. In that picture…
Although it’s based on the true story of the illegitimate daughter of a Royal Navy captain and an enslaved African woman, Amma Asante’s Belle’s richest inspiration comes from a painting. A 1779 double portrait hanging at Scone Palace in Scotland, it shows a pretty blond teenager decked out in typical…
One of the great pleasures of regular moviegoing isn’t seeing great films. It’s finding the little oddballs, the modest entertainments that miss just as often as they hit, but leave you with the feeling that someone poured heart, soul, and a sense of humor into the work at hand. Fading…
The sexual politics of Nick Cassavetes’ decidedly un-romantic comedy The Other Woman are intriguingly European and, at their core, kind of groovy. Wronged Connecticut wifey-wife Kate (Leslie Mann) seeks out her husband’s mistress, sexy city-slicker and high-powered lawyer Carly (Cameron Diaz), looking to her for answers: Why is my husband…
The vampires who walk among us — and they do — are not the Twilight kind, or the True Blood kind, or even the Buffy kind. In the world of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, the director’s most emotionally direct film since Dead Man, and maybe his finest, period,…
Sometimes it’s helpful to know certain details about how a film has come together. And sometimes it’s just so much information. Transcendence, the directorial debut of Christopher Nolan’s go-to cinematographer, Wally Pfister, was shot on film rather than digitally, as most big Hollywood movies (and nearly all small ones) are…
The promise of seeing Scarlett Johansson fully nude is probably enough to lure lots of people into Jonathan Glazer’s alien-among-us fantasy Under the Skin, and the vision doesn’t disappoint: Her figure, seen in long shot, is a grand and glowing thing; she has one of those butts shaped, adorably, like…
To hear Darren Aronofsky tell it, in the interviews he’s given recently to the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, there was no way in hell he’d let his special effects extravaganza Noah, years in the planning, be your run-of-the-mill, candy-ass Biblical epic. The ark built by Russell…
