Yesterday’s honky-tonk hero, Bad Blake, arrives at a Clovis, New Mexico bowling alley. It’s another in a string of low-pay, low-turnout gigs with pickup bands half his age, grinding the Greatest Hits out of an old Fender Tremolux, including his breakout — with the chorus, “Funny how falling feels like…
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…
Pedro Almodóvar still believes in Pedro Almodóvar. “Everything’s already happened to me,” admits Harry Caine, the blind, middle-aged filmmaker in Broken Embraces. “All that’s left is to enjoy life.” ¡Sí! His own sights set low these days in his latest movie, reformed bad boy Pedro Almodóvar has at least hit…
The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron’s mega-3D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and, like the Hope Diamond waved in front of your nose, the bling is almost blinding. For the first 45 minutes, I’m thinking: Metropolis! — and wondering how to amend ballots already cast in polls of…
The most significant American artist before Andy Warhol to take “the media” as his medium, Orson Welles lives on not only in posthumously restored director’s cuts of his movies but as a character in other people’s novels, plays, and movies — notably Richard Linklater’s deft, affectionate, and unexpectedly enjoyable Me…
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…
There is something oddly familiar about Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, in which George Clooney plays a commitment-phobic business traveler with no use for meaningful human interaction. Could have sworn we’ve been here before. When was it? And where? Oh, yes, of course: Joel and Ethan Coen’s Intolerable Cruelty,…
Aside from Morgan Freeman, who makes a fabulous Nelson Mandela, there’s this to savor about Invictus, a rosy tale of racial reconciliation neatly wrapped in a triumphalist sports movie: The film is blessedly free of Obama parallels. Also, we could use a happy global moment, and Eastwood picks one out…
Don’t be misled by the cheesy, generic poster for Kirk Jones’ Everybody’s Fine, in which a grinning Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, and Kate Beckinsale pose with Robert De Niro (airbrushed almost to the point of unrecognizable) for their characters’ family photo in front of a Christmas tree. It’s a marketing…
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…
The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem — in which a father and his 10-year-old son traverse a despoiled landscape of unspeakable horror — was a quick, lacerating read. John Hillcoat’s adaptation, which arrives one Thanksgiving past its original release date is, by contrast, a long, dull…
Another poor, massive, uneducated African-American teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, The Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile, and ever-grateful to…
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…
Bella: I’m coming. Edward: I don’t want you to. —The Twilight Saga: New Moon Worry not for the purity of your tween girls, global mothers. Where Catherine Hardwicke’s lively, irreverent take on the first book in the Twilight series at least made room for a few suggestive winks, the sequel…
Seven months after its theatrical release in the U.K., and two months after its DVD debut there, Pirate Radio washes ashore in U.S. theaters with a different title (it was formerly known as The Boat That Rocked) and most of its better bits excised. Writer-director Richard Curtis, paying homage to…
Completing his multi-film vendetta against the world’s tourist trade, German-born director Roland Emmerich sends the mother of all storms to level the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower, and a priest-filled Vatican City, among other locales, in his newest end-times thriller, 2012. From Independence Day (1996) to The Day After Tomorrow…
It’s not hard to see how the director of Forrest Gump would be thought a good fit to adapt the dearly beloved (and much lampooned) Dickens tale that has survived nearly two centuries of retelling. Stuffed with simple souls winning over a stingy misanthrope to the view that life is…
Historical cataclysm produces conspiratorial thinking: Germany’s loss in World War I, the JFK assassination, and 9/11 are all naturally understood as the stuff of unimaginable plots, unspeakable cover-ups, and unseen forces. The guys who made The Men Who Stare at Goats can’t quite decide whether this syndrome is risible or…
Apart from the stray slasher flick, Halloween is traditionally a dead spot on the Hollywood calendar. This week’s big release? The Michael Jackson tribute film This Is It — creepy in its own right. But Universal Studios has been raiding its catacombs for DVD reissues. Let’s brush the cobwebs aside…
Like the ominous fingernail moon early on in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, the bloodsucker trend is again in a waxing phase thanks to the mass-cult followings of the Twilight saga and HBO’s True Blood. However, the only authentic vampires in this first (and, I can all but guarantee,…
Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel gives us Belle Époque Coco, opening in 1893 with a grim scene of the 10-year-old waif and her sister unceremoniously dumped at an orphanage, and ending around World War I, a few years before the Chanel empire is launched. Jan Kounen’s moldy Coco Chanel &…
