Pity Max Skinner, emasculated over his lamb chops. On a gray afternoon, at London’s hot spot du jour, his gloating superior unveils a plot to poach his most lucrative client, divesting him of a six-figure bonus (pounds sterling) in the process. Fuck it. The bummed-out bond trader hands in a…
Manufactured history guarantees a manufactured controversy: Gabriel Range’s Death of a President, which docudramatizes the 2007 assassination of George W. Bush, has been preceded by a long, raucous fanfare. Excoriated on talk radio, damned as a snuff film, banned by two theater chains, the British production has also garnered celebrity…
Time perhaps scrambling it’s for Alejandro González Iñárritu to stop his narratives. After making an exciting debut in 2000 with Amores Perros — a movie whose gimmicky, Tarantino-esque tinkering with structure seemed fresher en español and grounded in gritty Mexico City location shooting — González Iñárritu apparently decided to devote…
Ed Harris as Beethoven? The man who would be John Glenn is hardly the most instinctive choice to play the legendary composer, especially if you recall Gary Oldman’s performance in Immortal Beloved. Oldman embodied the maestro. Still, as Jackson Pollock in Pollock, Harris did bring to life a tormented, alcoholic…
Of all the hundreds of pedophile priests to be flushed out of the woodwork in recent Catholic Church history, Father Oliver O’Grady has to be one of the most harmless looking, and the most sinister. Wispy, unremarkable and accommodating, with an ingratiating half-smile playing permanently about his thin lips, Father…
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is funnier than its malapropistic title — the audience with whom I saw the movie wasn’t laughing so much as howling — and even more difficult to parse. Eyes wide, face fixed in an avid grin, Sacha Baron…
Milestone in Motion Picture History: On Halloween weekend, 2006, Saw III grossed $34.3 million to become the Iraq war era’s bloodiest chart-topping torture movie whose victims don’t include Jesus of Nazareth. God or Jack Valenti only knows how this work of pure entertainment got away with an R rating “for…
“I guess it doesn’t matter where I begin,” reasons the adult narrator of Running With Scissors, the inevitable Oscar contender adapted from Augusten Burroughs’ wacky memoir of coming out as a gay teen in his adoptive guru’s carnivalesque commune. “No one is gonna believe me anyway.” No one? In fact,…
There’s a scene about halfway through Catch a Fire during which freedom fighters — men and women, each boasting such nicknames as “Pete My Baby” and “Hot Stuff” — are being trained at an African National Congress safe house in Mozambique. Their ranks consist of South Africans who’ve been politicized…
The sex is real in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus; only the setting — an animated New York cityscape, benignly watched over by a fluorescent Statue of Liberty — is fake. To an extent, that describes the movie: a sexually daring, dramatically timid roundelay that employs unsimulated twosomes, threesomes, and even…
The Queen is more fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It’s also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring. Directed by Stephen Frears from Peter Morgan’s script, The Queen is set in the peculiar…
If the greatest magicians never reveal their tricks, then Christopher Nolan wouldn’t make it past the children’s birthday party circuit. It’s not that Nolan has anything against the old hocus-pocus, but it’s the practical side of magic that appeals to him most — the nuts-and-bolts explanation behind the seemingly “impossible”…
A single photograph, we’re told early on in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, can win or lose a war. But sometimes, that photo shows us only part of the story, whether it’s the part we don’t want to see — slaughtered villagers at My Lai, tortured prisoners at Abu…
Drop-dead hip or cluelessly clueless? Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a candy-colored portrait of France’s infamous teen queen, is a graceful, charming, and sometimes witty confection — at least for its first hour. The famously shy Coppola may be an inscrutable personality, but her bold exposé of backstage royalty opens with…
Front-loaded with family discord, terminal cancer, prodigal jailbait, a cute kiddy looking for love, and other accessories of the ready-to-wear soap opera, Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is as heartfelt, sincere, and soggy with nostalgia as some of his other periodic homages to the virtues of peasant…
There is no way of sidestepping the issue, so why not jump right into it: Infamous, this year’s retelling of how Truman Capote wound up in Kansas writing his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, never comes close to approaching the quiet, devastating brilliance of Capote, last year’s retelling of how…
Barry Levinson hasn’t made a movie of note in almost a decade — since 1997’s Wag the Dog, to be precise, and even that was less a work of substantial relevance than a bit of lucky timing based on someone else’s better novel. Granted, it had its moments — at…
In The Last King of Scotland, an adequate thriller redeemed by Forest Whitaker’s sensational turn as Idi Amin, freshly qualified Scottish physician Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) arrives in Uganda in 1970, ravenous for adventure. Under the rigorous and vaguely romantic tutelage of a lithe blonde with a flabby marriage and…
Generic VH1 rock doc The U.S. vs. John Lennon is snazzy, mawkish, and practically Pavlovian in recycling all requisite late-’60s images. Given its subject, though, this David Leaf-John Scheinfeld production is not only poignant but even topical. Once upon a time, in the summer of 1971, John Lennon and Yoko…
No studio director was a greater hero to the Hong Kong new wave than Martin Scorsese. John Woo dedicated The Killer to him; Wong Kar-wai modeled his first feature, As Tears Go By, after Mean Streets; Taxi Driver’s rain-slicked slo-mo urban stylistics worked their way into countless lesser HK films…
Watching The Guardian, you will learn that the U.S. Coast Guard’s rescue swimmers rank among the bravest and least heralded of military personnel, selflessly hurling themselves into raging currents or hurricane swells to save a single human life. But I doubt that even these knights in neoprene armor could rescue…
Sweet, crazy, and tinged with sadness, Michel Gondry’s new feature, The Science of Sleep, is a wondrous concoction. The tricksy romantic narrative — in which Gael García Bernal plays a hapless, Chaplinesque madman — may be reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Gondry directed from Charlie Kaufman’s…
