The Great Gatsby: Sometimes Great, But Not Always Good

There’s a scene in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s hyper-rich, super-awkward Jay Gatsby takes it upon himself to redecorate the bachelor pad of his less-prosperous friend, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Gatsby’s old flame, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), is coming to Nick’s house for tea. Eager to…

At Any Price Makes Good Drama of Bad Seeds

Farm films blow up human drama to mythic, big-sky terms in which the world itself is represented by a character’s land, hard-earned and easily lost. Vast landscapes, both psychic and literal, are threatened by unstoppable outside forces. Kind of like zombie movies, farm films are vast canvases for directors to…

For At Any Price Director Ramin Bahrani, Bigger Films Demand Bigger Targets

Responding to the uproar in April over the passage — and President Obama’s signage — of the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act,” the gene-bending agri-giant Monsanto issued a press release dismissing any attendant conspiracy theories as “worthy of a B-grade movie script.” They got it half right. Immediate in its politics…

In the House Takes the Thriller Apart to Build it Anew

The supreme testament to Hitchcock is that no matter how many years pass, his work exerts an ever-stronger influence. Just last month came Park Chan-Wook’s reimagining of Shadow of a Doubt, Stoker, and last year Anthony Hopkins did Hitchcock as a Hitchcock character in Hitchcock — and let’s not forget…

Want a Vague Idea of Midnight’s Children? See the Movie!

One of the most beguiling of the many stories all knotted up in Salman Rushdie’s brilliant, baggy, exhausting 1981 novel Midnight’s Children concerns a lovelorn doctor, his beautiful patient, and that timeless exemplar of old-world prudishness: a sheet with a hole in it. The patient, Naseem, not yet of marriageable…

R.I.P., Ray Harryhausen, Master of the Handmade Fantasy

In the course of reviewing movies in the early 2000s, just as computer-generated special effects were becoming radically sophisticated and also were, increasingly, becoming the chief selling point of big-ticket movies, I more and more often found myself invoking the name “Ray Harryhausen.” He died on Tuesday, May 7, at…

Hollywood: Enough With the Father-Son Dramas, Already!

In his new film, the social drama At Any Price, director and co-writer Ramin Bahrani examines how the transformation of food into intellectual property through seed patents has corrupted, impoverished, or dissolved the American family farm. As with the Iranian-American director’s previous films (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo),…

For NYC Teens, The We and the I Goes Round and Round

The title promises something rarefied and heady, but The We and the I, Michel Gondry’s shaggy, roving social study, is grounded in home truth. If you’ve been to high school, you know all about it: The dreaded “we” that tends to form vicious clusters — in the cafeteria, the smoke…

Matthew McConaughey Is Great, Again, in Mud

Has anyone ever been so perfectly cast as Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused? Sculpted entirely of charisma and cheekbones yet still seedier than a stash of gym-locker pot, McConaughey’s radiant stoner exemplified high school promise gone bad. he looked like the little man of top of trophies, just horny,…

10 Indie Movies You’ll Want to See (and Skip) This Summer

This summer has an abundance of noteworthy films coming out and quite a few that might not be worth the cost of admission. Jackalope Ranch is here to help guide you through the movie madness with five must see indie flicks that should go mainstream and five more that can…

Our 10 Favorite Moments from RuPaul’s Drag Race: Season 5

Season five of RuPaul’s Drag Race is one of the most dramatic seasons to date. Unlike previous seasons, there was no clear winner from the get-go. We had a feeling Sharon Needles and Raja were going to win, and we’re still disappointed that Tyra Sanchez beat out Raven and Jujubee…

Iron Man 3: Shtick and Explosions for Robert Downey Jr.

Where has Robert Downey Jr. gone? There’s no doubt he’s the star of Iron Man 3; he sprints through the picture like a neurotic panther. And yet he’s absent, detached in a Zen-like way from the whole affair. The nakedness that defines his best performances — in any role, up…

Simon Killer Aces the Oldest, Darkest of Stories

“The meek shall inherit the Earth,” somebody said once — probably Truffaut. Two pictures into his thrilling career, writer-director Antonio Campos seems determined to show us that might not be anything to celebrate. Campos’ debut, 2008’s Afterschool, was essentially one part Blow Up to three parts Rushmore-as-psychological-horror-flick. While it took…

Kon-Tiki Is a Grand Story, Told Again

Would you sign on for three months in shark-infested waters on a tippy raft under a captain who can’t swim? The shrewdest joke in Kon-Tiki’s surefire story — about Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,000-mile South Pacific expedition to prove that ocean-faring Incans could have settled Tahiti — is that practically every character…

Mad Men: Five Academic Theories Explaining Life at SCDP

Just as Mad Men charms its viewers by using sex, drugs, snappy banter, and pretty people to make heavy topics (sexism, racism, dreams diffused) palatable, the editors of Mad Men, Mad World trust that some TV glamour will get readers interested in digesting academic theories. It’s not wrong. Full of…