Re-reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement last weekend, my first thought was: I hope to God that Joe Wright — whose broadly grinning Pride & Prejudice made a mess of Jane Austen two years ago — doesn’t screw up this wonderful novel about lust, love, loss, and what art can do to…
Casting Nicole Kidman as The Golden Compass’ glacial, intractably smooth megalomaniac Mrs. Coulter is no less inspired for being obvious. Indeed, she was the first and only choice for director Chris Weitz, who adapted this first installment of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Despite the book’s description of the…
Rock films come in two forms. The first is the concert/documentary variety, the best of which pinpoint a band’s musical moment within the context of its era: the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin chronicling the Stones in Gimme Shelter, Martin Scorsese celebrating the Band in The Last Waltz. Then you…
There are comedies of discomfort, and then there’s Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s scalding follow-up to The Squid and the Whale. An immersion in sibling malice and simmering resentment, with one of the most infuriating characters in recent movies holding us under, Margot tramples the commandment that only the…
Hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since the release of The Princess Bride, if only because it hasn’t aged a day — the mark of something truly, blessedly timeless. The trailer for Disney’s new Enchanted at least suggested that it aspired to Princess Bride greatness. If nothing else,…
I’m Not There is the movie of the year — but to whom does Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic actually belong, and when was it really made? The great attention-grabber of last month’s New York Film Festival, I’m Not There is as notable for its stunt casting as its elusive…
Literally speaking, Bob Dylan isn’t “there” in Todd Haynes’s staggering mix-tape biopic I’m Not There. Or rather, he’s everywhere and nowhere — a Heisenbergian particle whose locus shifts with our every attempt to pin him down. Of course, his words are there, in the nearly three-dozen Dylan songs that fill…
As one of what novelist Stephen King calls his Constant Readers, I was as jazzed as every other monster-lovin’ geek when word came that filmmaker Frank Darabont was making a movie of King’s classic novella, The Mist. Cynics suggested that after tanking big time with his Frank Capra homage, The…
Midway through the amiable children’s movie Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, there comes a speech that I’ll wager writer-director Zach Helm had been saving for future use ever since he discovered the Bard. As pop philosophy goes, it’s bracing stuff: Paraphrasing King Lear, Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman), a 243-year-old “toy impresario”…
A doom-ridden pulp cabalist with a dark sense of purpose as well as humor, Richard Kelly shoots the moon with his rich, strange, and very funny sci-fi social satire, Southland Tales. Kelly’s debut, Donnie Darko, was the first post-millennial cult hit; his second feature, Southland Tales, achieved film maudit status…
Although he plays a college professor in his latest film, Robert Redford was, by his own admission, never much of a student, consistently more interested in what was going on outside the classroom window than inside. But there’s one moment from Redford’s academic past that burns brightly in his memory…
Jonathan Demme, who directed Tom Hanks to an Oscar as the AIDS-afflicted lawyer in Philadelphia, may be the most well-meaning filmmaker in Hollywood. Jimmy Carter, winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human…
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is less Sidney Lumet’s comeback than his resurrection. Three years after being presented a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the 83-year-old director comes forth with a violent family melodrama that is his strongest movie in at least two decades. Robustly directed from Kelly Masterson’s bear-trap screenplay…
“There’s a reason I’ve had some good pictures and other guys will never have good pictures,” Sidney Lumet says matter-of-factly on a recent afternoon in his New York office — four cramped white walls, unadorned by awards or other memorabilia, on the top floor of the Ansonia building, where Enrico…
“Hold still.” That’s what the hunters say to the hunted in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. The first time we hear it, it’s the out-of-work Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) whispering optimistically to the antelope he spies through his rifle sight while perched on the crest…
Banking on the career choices of Vince Vaughn garners increasingly erratic returns, which is ironic, given that he has finally settled on (or surrendered to) a consistent onscreen persona: his own bad self. Uneasy from the beginning, Vaughn avoided the superstardom that seemed within reach after Swingers by trying on…
Wristcutters: A Love Story, a well-wrought indie written and directed by Goran Dukic, has to be the kewpie doll of current zombie flicks: Its walking dead are a bunch of attractive slackers whose wounds are largely internal. They’ve got attitude. Before the opening credits end, the movie’s glum protagonist has…
Less a war drama than a set of dueling position papers, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs may be the gabbiest movie ever made about American foreign policy — and it wasn’t even written by Aaron Sorkin. Hot young screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is fresh off his alpha-male script for The…
Alas, there’s only so much you can do with talking bugs that hasn’t already been covered in A Bug’s Life, Antz, and The Ant Bully — though hooking up Seinfeld’s buzzed-cut Barry B. Benson with a hottie human voiced by Renée Zellweger is a first, sort of a new spin…
American Gangster is a movie with obvious gravitas and a familiar argument: Organized crime is outsider capitalism. As archetypal as its title, Ridley Scott’s would-be epic aspires to enshrine Harlem dope king Frank Lucas in Hollywood heaven, heir to Scarface and the Godfather. Or, as suggested by the Mark Jacobson…
John Cusack, who more or less began his career sneaking a peek at Molly Ringwald’s panties in Sixteen Candles, has finally become an onscreen daddy — took only, what, 23 years? But he’s not exactly the most fortunate family man in film: First, in Martian Child he plays a widower…
“I hope people ask me, ‘Where did you find that local actress?'” Ben Affleck told Amy Ryan when he cast her as a wreck of a single mother in his directing debut, Gone Baby Gone. When Ryan showed up on the Boston set in ratty hair, muddy makeup, and a…
