The stately Japanese movie Departures comes into theaters trailing some justified ill will for having trounced the critical favorite, Israel’s Waltz with Bashir, for Best Foreign Film at last year’s Academy Awards. It’s not hard to fathom what Academy voters, who skew mature, saw in Departures, an earnest appeal for…
“Heterosexuals can’t understand camp because everything they do is camp,” opined an associate of the old Playhouse of the Ridiculous, a New York theater known for its good-natured, anarchic sexual farce — a piece like Turds in Hell, which offered a farrago of sodomy, sadomasochism, incest, coprophagia, bestiality, homosexual behavior…
Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S…
“They’re all about where people come from. Nobody seems to wonder where somebody’s going.” So says the Depression-era bank-robber-cum-folk-hero John Dillinger upon surveying the clientele of a chic Chicago eatery in a key scene from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. And, much like its subject, Mann’s exhilarating movie exists in a…
Character is destiny — at least for Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. Allen’s exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia opens with a snatch of Groucho Marx singing his trademark paradoxical assertion (“Hello, I must be going”) and is powered almost entirely by the presence of a single, larger-than-life, and less than likeable,…
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a bewildering, noisy, sloppy, cynical piece of work, a movie that sneers at the audience for 147 minutes and expects us to lap it up as entertainment — and be grateful. This is blockbuster porn absent even the suggestion of care or concern for…
Not quite The Further Adventures of Cain & Abel, the second coming of Beavis & Butt-Head, King Kong vs. Godzilla Redux, or Peyton Meets Eli, but energetic fun nonetheless, Rudo y Cursi is a multiple brother act: It’s written and directed by Carlos Cuarón and produced by elder sibling Alfonso,…
Eleven-year-old Anna Fitzgerald’s parents didn’t just plan for her — they customized her in utero, with the specific end of providing spare parts and infusions for her leukemia-sick older sister, Kate. From a 2004 Jodi Picoult bestseller, My Sister’s Keeper mashes Death Be Not Proud with Irreconcilable Differences. When Kate…
Fifteen minutes after seeing The Proposal, I’d forgotten I’d seen The Proposal. Well, that’s not entirely true: By then, it had simply merged in my memory with a thousand other films just like it — those in which phony lovers bound together by dubious circumstances become honest-to-kissin’ couples in just…
In the new romantic road-movie dramedy Away We Go, SNL alum Maya Rudolph and The Office’s John Krasinski play an unexpectedly expectant couple roaming North America (Phoenix, Madison, Montreal, more) with the intent to nest, popping in on eccentric friends and relations (Jeff Daniels, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Allison Janney, more) and…
Want to know how a city works? Start by watching 1974’s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, a primer in which subway hijackers test how long it’ll take a million bucks to pass through Gotham’s plumbing. Turns out an hour is just enough time to roust the hated mayor…
Midway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers’ solipsistic, terminally-apologetic-for-being-solipsistic portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-slacker-messiah, the author, upon interviewing to become a cast member of MTV’s The Real World, makes the following observation about his generation of self-obsessed, media-savvy technobrats: “These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational,…
What Fletch was to plaid-checked water-cooler wits in the ’80s, what National Lampoon’s Van Wilder was to college-bound douches at the dawn of Dubya, that’s what 2003’s Old School is to Gen-X frat rats — a secret-handshake movie. A shaggy, intermittently hilarious wish-fulfillment nightmare about sorta dissatisfied, sorta middle-aged dudesters…
Pundits agree: The 2008 election has finally and forever rung down the curtain on America’s longest-running psychodrama, namely the Boomerography, a.k.a. the ’60s. The long, strange trip is finally over. Still, a few stories remain to be told or retold. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 marks a particular 40th anniversary —…
First of all, Up is not a movie about a cranky old coot who, with the help of a roly-poly Boy Scout, finds his inner child during a series of magical adventures experienced from the front porch of a dilapidated manse held aloft by hundreds of helium-filled balloons. Such, of…
Sam Raimi wants to go home again. Often a drifting virtuoso in the years before finding his Spider-Man gig, with Drag Me to Hell Raimi defaults to the horror romps that made his name (namely, the Evil Dead trilogy), bringing the old barreling camera and viscous ickiness back and serving…
At 73, the Memphis-born actor, stuntman, former U.S. Marine, and Golden Gloves boxer Red West has the stoic, leathery repose of a barfly on a John Ford or Howard Hawks saloon wall. He doesn’t talk much, and when he does, reveals even less, but there’s an abyss of longing and…
CANNES, France — Memorable for its in-your-face sensationalism, the 62nd Cannes Film Festival opened with the 3-D computer animation Up, saving the “Yours” for the final minutes of the competition’s penultimate movie, Gaspar Noé’s “psychedelic melodrama” Enter the Void. The sad, tawdry, monstrously inflated tale of two traumatized club kids…
Both warning and advertisement, the Terminator films are technophobic teases, selling tickets by promising this decade’s model of killing machine: the classic V8 1984 Schwarzenegger; the bullet-streamlined, liquid-metal ’91 Robert Patrick of T2: Judgment Day; Kristanna Loken’s 2003 T-X (with burgundy pleather upholstery). Terminator Salvation, a departure in many ways,…
Writer-director Rian Johnson fashions a universe in which time is a fluid thing — where everything takes place in a familiar today and an otherworldly yesterday, where the audience is at once agreeably comfortable and inexplicably unsettled. When his characters don’t look out of place in their derbies and dusters,…
Jim Jarmusch’s anonymous antihero hitman (French-Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé), identified in the credits of The Limits of Control as the Lone Man, exists only in terms of his unspecified mission. The Lone Man is introduced in an overhead shot doing tai chi in an airport toilet stall, then taking…
Angels & Demons is still no more than another treat for wacked-out male conspiracy theorists, mind you, and at 138 minutes, it’s a scant 10 minutes shorter than The Da Vinci Code. But the movie clips along, tricked out with state-of-the-art hardware and a hotter, brighter partner for Hanks in…
