In the opening scene of Friends With Kids, a conspicuously placed copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion on the bedside table of Jason (Adam Scott) marks him as a nonbeliever. His doubt also extends to conjugal matters, for he is unconvinced that married parents could ever be happy. Sharing…
Recording “Les Filles du Crazy,” an anthem that they’ll later lip-synch onstage, half a dozen women — performers at the Crazy Horse, Paris’s classy nudie cabaret — sing of themselves, “They are the soldiers of the erotic army.” The military metaphor proves apt, as Frederick Wiseman’s spellbinding documentary on the…
“You just have to get crazier” were the words of advice that mighty choreographer Pina Bausch once gave to one of her dancers, who fondly recalls the moment in Wim Wenders’ soaring 3-D tribute to the woman who revolutionized the art with her tanztheater (“dance theater”) — and who died…
The first 10 minutes of Dee Rees’ funny, moving, nuanced, and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are inseparable, sharply reveal the conflicts that 17-year-old Alike (Adepero Oduye) faces. At a lesbian club — maybe for the first time — she gapes in awe…
A holy hot mess of the sacred and the inane, Joyful Noise, about a small-town Southern gospel choir, lifts from Usher’s “Yeah!” to give us this inspirational lyric: “Now God and I are the best of homies.” The film is Jesus for Gleeks — no surprise, since writer-director Todd Graff’s…
An undeniably charming homage to Hollywood in the late 1920s, The Artist probably will be the most successful silent movie since the days of the Gish sisters. It might also be the first silent film many of its viewers have ever seen. French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius, who has previously struck…
A simple, powerful act of bearing witness, We Were Here is a sober reminder of the not-too-distant past, when gays were focused not on honeymoon plans but on keeping people alive. David Weissman’s oral history of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco also explores the specifics of psychogeography: Vividly recalling…
Desperately trying to appeal to not just the Gen X’ers who grew up with Kermit, Miss Piggy, and Dr. Teeth, but also the tykes who’ve never even heard of Jim Henson, The Muppets has none of the easy confidence of the original TV show or the 1979 movie. Those Carter-era…
Standing outside his small-town Ohio home, his wife and child busy preparing breakfast inside, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) looks up at the ominous, slate-gray sky in the first scene of Take Shelter. The clouds open, raining down oily, piss-colored droplets. It’s end-of-days weather, a phenomenon that only Curtis seems to…
Drowned out by the drum circles at Occupy Wall Street, writer-director J.C. Chandor’s lifeless Margin Call depicts 36 hours at a Manhattan investment firm at the dawn of the 2008 financial freak-out. Chandor’s debut feature audaciously asks us to empathize with obscenely overpaid risk analysts and their bosses, a gambit…
What I don’t know: why these movies keep getting made. I Don’t Know How She Does It is based on Allison Pearson’s 2002 diaristic, comic bestseller and directed by Douglas McGrath. But its real auteur is screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, scripter of wan workplace romantic comedies such as the limp…
At one point in Higher Ground, Vera Farmiga’s decade-spanning directorial debut, the actress, playing Corinne, a woman still soaked with lake water after her baptism into an evangelical sect, resembles no less a touchstone than Ronee Blakley in Robert Altman’s Nashville: slightly high hair; starchy, sexless, long tunic dress; swaying…
Gavin Wiesen’s first film, as passive and vanilla as its title, continues the numbing trendlet begun in 2008 with Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist: dramatizing the stupefying dullness of privileged white teenagers in New York City. Protagonist George (Freddie Highmore) is an 18-year-old Upper West Side Bartleby, preferring not to…
Dissolute action-movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), first seen doing laps in his black Ferrari, has no destination in Somewhere, Sofia Coppola’s mood ring of celebrity lassitude. Coppola’s fourth feature, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice this year, is, at times, similarly aimless and empty. But those who groan…
It’s taken almost two years for the bonkers, exhilarating same-sex romantic comedy I Love You Phillip Morris to finally reach theaters. Premièring at Sundance in January 2009, the movie was a near-casualty of nervous-nellie U.S. distributors — more comfortable with innocuous gay genres like the homosexual weepie or the martyr…
“What if we choose to exist solely in a reality of our own making?” asks Pittsburgh community college lit professor John Brennan (Russell Crowe) rhetorically during a discussion of Don Quixote in The Next Three Days, Paul Haggis’s fourth effort as director. Like his lumpy protagonist, Haggis, who also scripted…
It’s a long, long way from the women’s bar outside Berkeley, California, where Ntozake Shange first presented her combustible choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, in December 1974, to Atlanta’s Tyler Perry Studios, where the impresario filmed much of this calamitous adaptation. Though striving…
When we first see Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the final adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, she is being transported to a hospital in Gothenburg, bloodied almost beyond recognition, the result of a bullet put in her brain by Zalachenko, her barbaric…
After Fox Searchlight’s Amelia spectacularly flamed out last October, the studio tries again to grab awards-season honors with another biopic starring and executive-produced by Hilary Swank. Gone is the Kansas-patrician enunciation and smartly tailored Depression-era trousers; as Conviction’s Betty Anne Waters, a Massachusetts high school dropout and single mom who…
Davis Guggenheim’s call-to-arms documentary on the failures of the U.S. public-education system — thoroughly laudable in intention if maddening in its logic and omissions — originated with his own guilty conscience. An Academy Award winner for 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, the director, whose debut doc, 2001’s The First Year, heralded…
Recording a three-day competition in Lyon, France, in which sugar is heated, stretched, and blown into delicate, rococo shapes, Kings of Pastry has none of the shame-and-humiliation rituals of reality TV cook-offs like Top Chef, no dishy Padma Lakshmi to coolly eliminate hopefuls. Though Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s food-fetishizing…
Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals safety who enlisted in the Army Rangers eight months after September 11, read Emerson, Chomsky, and, though an atheist, the Bible. Resembling a beefier Seann William Scott, he shunned cell phones, cars, and professional-athlete megalomania. A fiercely private (and principled) person, his death in Afghanistan…
