Because they’re crafted outside the Hollywood system, you might assume that this year’s Oscar-nominated live-action and animated shorts stand in sharp defiance to conventional mainstream cinema. But the best of these 10 entries are, in some ways, the most familiar — their most radical element being that they operate in…
In Pretty Woman, director Garry Marshall’s personal cinematic high score, the opening credits close (and the closing credits open) with the voice of a street freak, barely noticeable in wide shot, chanting an absurd mantra —”Welcome to Hollywood, land of dreams!” Twenty years later, Marshall dips into the same well…
The White Ribbon is Michael Haneke’s first German-language film since the original Funny Games (1997) and, addressing what used to be called “the German problem” while dodging the filmmaker’s own likeability issues, it’s his best ever. A period piece set on the eve of World War I in an echt…
As personal assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to France, James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) can keep himself in well-tailored suits and keep his terrific-looking kittenish girlfriend (Kasia Smutniak) in a nice Paris apartment. This is the basis for director Pierre Morel’s delicate study in trans-Atlantic manners, From Paris With Love,…
“Did you shoot my daughtah?” is the question posed, in flat-voweled Bostonian, in the trailer for Edge of Darkness. And Mel Gibson, bereaved and vengeful, from Hamlet to Ransom to Revolutionary America, sets out to settle another score. Gibson is Thomas Craven: veteran, homicide detective, lonesome widower. His daughter, a…
Extraordinary Measures is a race-against-time thriller in which a desperate dad (Brendan Fraser) sacrifices everything to cure a rare disease that’s seconds away from killing his kids. Extraordinary Measures is also a heartwarming tale about a disgruntled doc (Harrison Ford) who throws in with a biotech startup fronted by …
A one-film cabinet of curiosities, The Lovely Bones turns the most successful CGI director of the ’00s loose on one of the decade’s prime literary phenomena: Cults collide as Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson tackles Alice Sebold’s bestselling New Age gothic, the story of a rape-murder-dismemberment and its aftermath,…
Directors Allen and Albert Hughes were raised by an Armenian mother and African-American father. With such a background, it would be difficult not to have feelings about the church. The Hugheses’ fourth film, The Book of Eli, centers on the Christianity that was at the margins of their previous films…
For years, Hollywood has wrestled with adapting C.D. Payne’s 1993 novel Youth in Revolt — which, actually, was three novels collected under one title, and so the possibilities were endless, given 500 pages of material to mine. In 1996, Fox filmed a pilot starring Chris Masterson as Nick Twisp, the…
Is this a commercial for the National Tourism Council of Ireland or for the conditioner Amy Adams uses in her hair? Either way, both look fabulous. Then there’s the movie, a soggy affair directed with no great enthusiasm by Anand Tucker. Leap Year draws its dubious premise from a supposed…
1. The Hurt Locker: The decade’s strongest Iraq movie is also the year’s finest action flick, not to mention director Kathryn Bigelow’s personal best. Working from Mark Boal’s knowledgeable script, The Hurt Locker is impressively old school in its construction of suspense and character, and horrifically topical in its depiction…
On a late March morning, the sun sits high in the Cape Town sky, illuminating the trapezoidal monolith of Table Mountain in the distance, while down by the city’s busy waterfront, the players of South Africa’s national rugby union team — the Springboks — go for a training run. Only…
Looking back on a decade dominated by the movie franchise — Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Spider-Man, to name just a few — and overrun with prequels and sequels (Saw I, Saw II, Saw III, Saw . . .), each of our three critics picks three…
Enticing Jeff Bridges to voice a washed-up surfer dude in the 2007 children’s movie Surf’s Up, the filmmakers sent the actor a video of an animated penguin declaiming a few of his lines from The Big Lebowski. They probably didn’t need to work that hard: An avid surfer, Bridges has…
Does Nancy Meyers hate women? The thought ran through my head not very long into It’s Complicated, Meyers’ biennial stocking-stuffer about the romantic trials and tribulations of obscenely privileged and narcissistic Southern Californians. Once more into the breach goes Meyers to show us what women really want, this time with…
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,…
