“I do think the writing is pessimistic — all that stuff about life being a tragic experience,” says Angela Stark (played by newcomer Hayley Atwell) early in Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream. An actress talking about the play she’s appearing in at a small London theater, Stark could just as well…
It took nine years for Godzilla to rise up out of the ashes of Hiroshima and wreak his destruction on the good people of Tokyo in 1954. Here in America, it’s taken just over six years for the idea of an escapist disaster movie set on the streets of New…
Having a child destroys your immune system to horror, real or imagined. Before the blessed event, you could laugh off The Exorcist, The Omen, or any of a thousand gory shockers with some wide-eyed tyke as either the prey or the spawn of Beelzebub. Afterwards, you can’t even see the…
Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed return to the fray, Youth Without Youth, is a curious project — well-crafted, personal, and movie-movie old-fashioned even in its vanguard aspirations. Simply put, it’s a Faustian romance about the reversal of time and transmigration of souls which, shot mainly in Romania, adds a soupçon of…
Since promising Armageddon in the leadoff bars of Straight Outta Compton, star-producer Ice Cube has been one canny career man. In recent years, he’s pulled up stake in the foundering rap game and doesn’t seem to think twice about the cred damage that could come from pratfalling through PG family…
A great brooding thundercloud of a movie, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood arrives as if from nowhere on a gust of critical acclaim, lowering over a landscape of barren mesas and hot, scrubby hills. Anderson’s epic, no less than his career, is both fearfully grandiose and wonderfully eccentric…
“You don’t meet the book when you meet the writer,” the novelist William Gibson has said. “You meet the place where it lives.” A relatively uncontroversial remark about the people who vent their imaginations on the page — no one should expect Philip Roth to sound exactly like Nathan Zuckerman…
It’s that time of year again. Our six critics don’t always (or often) agree, but we’ve combined their top 10 lists (allowing for ties) to pretend that they do! So without further ado, the 10 (or 15) best movies of the year, kind of: 1. There Will Be Blood The…
How tough is it for a movie to find its audience, above the din of blockbuster marketing and beyond the clogged distribution pipeline? Tsai Ming-liang, the Taiwanese/Malaysian director regarded as one of the world’s greats, had two films in U.S. theaters this year, The Wayward Cloud and I Don’t Want…
The year: 2505. Your viewing choices tonight: an oldie but a goodie — a picture called Ass, a feature-length screensaver of butt cheeks punctuated by the occasional fart — or the hit TV show Ow! My Balls, a connoisseur’s compendium of nutsack whacks. Thanks to Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, we have…
Absolutely, unequivocally, this has been The Year of the Apatow: Judd got Knocked Up to the tune of $150 million (at the box office alone); the super-okay Superbad, which Apatow produced, grossed another $120 million, “gross” being the operative word; and at year’s end, he walks hard to the finish…
An acquaintance who fought in both Afghanistan and Iraq says he has no use for documentaries about George Bush’s bungling of the War on Terror. He has not and will not see a single one of the movies made about the tragic consequences of the administration’s rush to drop bombs…
Some years it can be hard to come up with enough stellar lead performances to make an awards minyan. But every year is a good year for supporting roles, and not just because the field has grown so wide since independent film became a force to be reckoned with. Many…
It was only a couple of years ago that the horror genre seemed newly resurgent, like an undead killer digging himself out of the grave. “Fresh-faced” directors like Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Darren Lynn Bousman, and James Wan — many of whom were dubbed “The Splat Pack” — seemed poised…
At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the American painter turned filmmaker Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls) won the jury’s Best Director award for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, his French-language adaptation of the bestselling memoir by the late Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby. Felled by a massive stroke…
Here’s the thing: Tim Burton pulled it off. Nearing the end of an uncommonly strong year for American movies, he’s taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative from well over two hours to well under, cast confessed non-singers in the principal roles, and somehow…
Simmering below the squeamish elder-care euphemism “uncharted territory” is a fearful awareness that when it comes to dealing with the growing army of senile parents, we have no idea what the hell we’re doing. Tamara Jenkins plumbs the depths of that terror in her new film, The Savages, and jacks…
As an actor, John C. Reilly is the opposite of Mr. Cellophane. He doesn’t disappear into a role; roles disappear onto him — the unlikely porn sidekick of Boogie Nights, the inadequately adequate family man of The Hours, the cutup cowboy of A Prairie Home Companion, all stamped and imprinted…
Kites fly high over the San Francisco Bay and Kabul (okay, China), but not much else soars in Marc Forster’s flaccid adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s vivid 2002 novel, which covers three decades of Afghanistan’s misery under serial totalitarian rule. Arriving on the heels of Atonement, The Kite Runner tells a…
Hell of a thing, getting Mike Nichols to adapt the yer-kiddin’-me story of Charlie Wilson, the congressman from Lufkin, Texas, who damn near single-handedly helped the Afghans kick out the Russians in the 1980s. Says right there on page 11 of the paperback edition of George Crile’s 2003 book Charlie…
There are two momentous performances in the Darwinian horror fable I Am Legend. One is by the movie’s star, Will Smith — but more about him in a minute. The other is by the movie’s visual effects, which render a near-future New York City that has been “ground zero” for…
Juno marks the second film for director Jason Reitman and the first for screenwriter Diablo Cody, author of the Pussy Ranch blog, which has very little to do with baby kittens. Reitman, having made his debut with a swaggering adaptation of Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking, is said to…
