Compare and contrast Laurent Cantet’s terrific The Class with any of the following schoolroom chestnuts — Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dangerous Minds, or To Sir, With Love. Note the structural similarities: misbehaving students, an educator who wants them to succeed, and big thoughts about the classroom as urban microcosm. Discuss the…
Tom Tykwer’s The International is one of those movies in which shadowy men meet in parked cars, abandoned buildings, and inconspicuous public spaces (museum galleries are a particular favorite), travel under assumed names, and always glance nervously over their shoulders, fearful of being spied on through a sniper’s lens. Some…
The Confessions of a Shopaholic we need right now would be a handheld doc featuring former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain sobbing into the camera and begging the American public to forgive him for purchasing a $35,000 commode. With its curious release date — the film is meant to be…
If Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a lovelorn bachelor in James Gray’s Two Lovers, were 12 years old, the movie might make a touching, if not noticeably fresh, romantic drama for tweens. Not that adults don’t nurse unhealthy crushes and regress madly under the pressure of hopeless infatuation, which may be…
If Alice in Wonderland were retold by the Mad Hatter, it might look something like Henry Selick’s 3-D, stop-motion Coraline, in which the bored, blue-haired 11-year-old of the title (voiced by Dakota Fanning) travels through the looking glass and ends up in a world that strangely resembles her own —…
The smirky, overbearing, and subliminally hostile romantic primer He’s Just Not That Into You seizes on some partial truths about the gender wars and blows them up into evolutionary gospel, as follows: Since cave-dwelling times, men have been programmed to chase. They hate being chased, lie through their teeth as…
And so the endless campaign wraps up with a flurry of virtual leaders. Richard Nixon will always be part of America’s dreamlife, with or without David Frost; the Bush II legacy will linger for years, even as W. addresses a yearning for closure. Like our president-elect, Milk arrives from left…
She’s too thin. She’s a bobble-head. Her forehead doesn’t move. Where has that Jerry Maguire girl gone, the one we once knew and loved? Did the Oscar from Cold Mountain ruin her forever? Or is Kenny Chesney to blame? It’s not easy being America’s Sweetheart. Nor is it any easier…
Ari Folman’s broodingly original Waltz with Bashir is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature. Folman, whose magic realist youth film Saint Clara was one of the outstanding Israeli films of the 1990s, has created a grim, deeply personal phantasmagoria around the 1982…
What is the shape and size of a human soul? Does it look like a chickpea? A gumdrop? A pet rock? And if you could somehow extract your soul from your body, what would be left? Would you still be you? These are among the concerns taken up by writer-director…
Brendan “Kids’ Choice” Fraser returns to the multiplex daycare as “Mo” Folchart, antiquarian-book-repairman-cum-adventurer. In Inkheart’s opening chapter, he’s identified as a member of a race of “Silvertongues” — those who, when they read aloud, can suck people out of and into the texts from which they’re reciting. Mo has abstained…
Will there be a special Academy Award for Best Aryan Costume Design this year? Everywhere you turn in the movies, it’s swastika flags and SS uniforms. Although the Holocaust movie has been on hiatus for a while, it seems lately as if everyone is trying to squeeze in their Schindler’s…
Notorious, about a crack dealer who becomes an iconic rapper who becomes a tragic legend, is the first film George Tillman Jr. has directed since 2000’s Men of Honor, about a sharecropper’s son who becomes the first black diver in the Navy who becomes the first amputee to return to…
The Wrestler may be plenty visceral, but it’s no more a sports movie than professional wrestling is a competitive sport. Chronic over-reacher Darren Aronofsky’s relatively unpretentious follow-up to the ridiculous debacle that was The Fountain is all about showbiz. It’s also a canny example. You want to make a comeback…
For as long as it forges ahead without explanations, The Unborn works in its way, as a series of snap-cut gotchas introducing each new contestant in its pageant of cold-sweat set-pieces. Often, this involves starlet Odette Yustman approaching some obscured, inevitably terrifying figure from behind, very . . . very…
No writer ever gazed deeper or more despairingly into the prison of middle-class American conformity than Richard Yates, which may explain why none of his books sold more than 12,000 copies in his lifetime and why it’s taken more than 40 years for one of them to reach the big…
Is it a sign of the apocalypse? Something in the water? Or is it just the way the wind is blowing? Whatever the case, when our often-contentious quintet of film critics (Scott Foundas, J. Hoberman, Jim Ridley, Ella Taylor, and Robert Wilonsky) put their heads together about the best movies…
As far as Jeffrey Katzenberg is concerned, there have been but two “revolutions” in the movie business: the mass introduction of sound with 1927’s The Jazz Singer (itself, a process 30 years in the making) and, a year later, the debut of The Viking, the first feature presented in Technicolor…
Michael Jacobs, a filmmaker based in San Francisco, is the director of a movie called Audience of One. It’s a documentary about a Pentecostal minister who says he’s gotten the divine green light to make a mega-budget, religious, science-fiction epic. If you attended one of 20-odd regional film festivals in…
“I hated the ’90s. The ’90s fuckin’ sucked,” says professional wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson early on in The Wrestler — and he should know. Over the hill and past his prime — his steroidal body a palimpsest of battle scars, his graying hair dyed a Nordic blond — Robinson…
“You’ve made the first movie of the Obama generation!” exclaimed an audience member, as he rushed up to Clint Eastwood after a recent screening of Gran Torino. “Well,” the 78-year-old actor-director replied, without missing a beat, “I was actually born under Hoover.” It was an ironic juxtaposition, given that Eastwood’s…
Walt Kowalski growls a lot — a dyspeptic rumble that wells up from deep inside his belly when he catches sight of his midriff-baring teenage granddaughter text-messaging her way through her grandmother’s funeral, or when his good-for-nothing son and daughter-in-law suggest that he sell his house in a gang-infested corner…
