Near the beginning of The Counterfeiters, a fact-based Holocaust drama by Austrian filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky, we meet Jewish money forger and former jailbird Salomon Sorowitsch (brilliantly played by Karl Markovics), packing to flee Berlin in 1936 with a suitcase full of fake money. We know from an opening coda that…
Based on a true story” is what The Bank Job brags before diving into the clear blue water of the Caribbean, where, in 1970, a topless woman frolics with two swimming mates — just another day in paradise. The trio retires to a hotel room for a sweaty, breathless afternoon…
Semi-Pro’s much better than Blades of Glory, which wasn’t nearly as good as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which was a little better than Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which was almost as funny as Old School, which was better than everything else Will Ferrell had done…
“When you sleep with the king, it ceases to be a private matter.” And so it comes to pass that young Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson) must stand before her father, Sir Thomas (Mark Rylance), and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), and report the nitty-gritty details of having…
The Band’s Visit made headlines after being disqualified as Israel’s foreign-language submission to the 2008 Academy Awards — an ironic fate, indeed, for a movie that takes language as its very subject. The official ruling of the Oscar referees was that too much of the film’s dialogue is in English,…
Set in Salamanca, Spain, during an international counterterrorism summit, it depicts an assassination attempt on the president of the United States from the perspective of five witnesses and, in the movie’s pièce de résistance, the members of the terror cell responsible for the attack. It’s a cast of characters the…
Like most wanna-be heroes of the eager-to-please teen comedy, poor little rich boy Charlie Bartlett is charming and quirky. Too charming by half and not nearly quirky enough, as played by an artfully rumpled and wide-eyed Anton Yelchin. Blazered, briefcased, and blitzed, Charlie comes to us newly expelled from his…
The pleasures of Be Kind Rewind do not extend far beyond the promise of its premise: Jack Black, magnetized and manic (yawn), erases every single video tape in the rental store where he hangs out and has to reshoot the movies with pal Mos Def. Theirs becomes a ramshackle filmography…
Fleet-footed corpses are, from a physiological point of view, complete bullshit. “If you run that fast, your ankles will snap off,” says Jason Creed (Josh Close) to fellow film student Ridley (Philip Riccio), the gauze-wrapped lead of his no-budget mummy opus The Death of Death. Pausing to regroup, cast and…
No celebrity hairdresser should ever be allowed near Colin Farrell’s eyebrows with a tweezer. Black, fluffy, and gloriously uni, they still aren’t the prettiest things about In Bruges. That honor falls to the Belgian city itself, known for its scenic medieval turrets, bourgeois tedium, and unfavorable comparisons with Amsterdam. Bruges…
Freudians disheartened by the Bearded One’s fall from psychotherapeutic grace may be cheered to learn that ol’ Sigmund lives and prospers at the movies, at least in child-friendly cinema. The Spiderwick Chronicles, an extravagantly oedipal fantasy adventure based on the popular children’s novels by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, comes…
Can’t get enough of Bill Clinton? Have we got a movie for you. Sandwiched somewhere between the American Spirit commercials and the Clinton campaigning that make up Definitely, Maybe is a surprisingly rewarding romantic comedy — one worth the effort, because some effort’s actually been put into it. Imagine, really,…
In Starting Out in the Evening, a new film by Andrew Wagner, a pneumatic graduate student spreads honey over the face of the elderly New York novelist she’s trying to seduce. Later, the two will lie down on his bed with their hands by their sides, and later still, he…
When a friend recently told me that she’d been confused by the poster for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson fortune-hunting romp Fool’s Gold adorning her local multiplex — that she’d thought for sure this movie had already come and gone — I understood her bewilderment. Even as a professional film critic…
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Sugar, which premièred in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival (and was inexplicably shut out at the awards right about baseball as any movie I’ve ever seen. It gets the hum of the lights in the ozone-heavy summer air and the…
Perhaps the most oft-quoted line from Zack Snyder’s cinematic adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel 300 is, “Tonight we dine in hell!” Chowing down on a box of Butterfinger Minis during a screening of Meet the Spartans, you will truly understand what that means. You remember 300, right? A…
A fourth Rambo? The question isn’t why; it’s what took him so long. Was America’s avenging angel of meat just planning to sit out Fallujah and what we’re cooking up for Iran and Syria? (Oops. Pretend that last part was redacted.) Okay, sure, last time we saw John Rambo, 20…
Regarding the irrelevance of Untraceable: First, torture is so 2007, and just because this drab little thriller with a flashy love of pain imagines itself a “critique of violence” doesn’t make it any less superfluous. Second of all, untraceable? Ha! You wish. While it’s true that the villain of our…
“How does this compare to other film festivals, like Cannes?” asked an inquisitive woman seated next to me at a screening on the first Saturday morning of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. I pondered the question for a moment, then replied that I was pretty sure you would never see…
What I want to say about the death of Heath Ledger is . . . nothing. No speculation on why he committed suicide, if he committed suicide. No comment on the chronology, the circumstances, the known facts or lurid details of his passing. No outrage at the ghoulish gathering outside…
If Diane Keaton were a comer in 2007, she’d likely be stuck in romantic comedies cooked up in movie studio test kitchens. No Godfather for her. No Annie Hall, no Shoot the Moon, no Reds. Filmmakers who now use Katherine Heigl as their go-to girl would be flummoxed by the…
Persepolis is a small landmark in feature animation. Not because of technical innovation — though it moves fluidly enough and its drawings have a handcrafted charm forgotten in the era of the cross-promoted-to-saturation CGI-‘toon juggernauts — but because it translates a sensitive, introspective, true-to-life, “adult” comic story into moving pictures…
