Going Out on a Limb With 'The Future' and 'Tucker and Dale vs. Evil'
The Future is an intimate drama as well as a quirkfest. Miranda July captures the frustration of finding yourself in an ordinary life, and for all the film’s magic realism, the relationships feel real.
View Article'Blackthorn' and 'Warrior' Revive Classic Hollywood Genres
The Western has been dying for more than 40 years, and maybe as a result, many of the best films in the genre in that time have an elegiac quality. Spanish writer/director Mateo Gil extends the long...
View Article'Essential Killing' and 'Hell and Back Again' Tackle a Tricky Subject:...
More reactionary American viewers will no doubt have a hard time with aspects of Essential Killing. Not only are a number of Americans/Westerners killed, but live Americans are typically portrayed as...
View Article'Higher Ground' Offers Sensitive Drama About Faith; 'The Woman' Serves Up...
If you’re Meryl Streep, you get asked to play Margaret Thatcher. If you’re one of the tens of thousands of other actresses in Hollywood, you most often get asked to play a wife, a mom, a girlfriend, a...
View Article'Project Nim' and "The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence): Two Grim New...
In 1973, a linguist named Herbert Terrace adopted an infant chimpanzee from a research lab in Oklahoma. “Adopted” is perhaps too neutral a term, though. As director James Marsh’s recent documentary...
View ArticleQuestioning Reality With 'World on a Wire' and 'Martha Marcy May Marlene'
In 1999, The Matrix wowed audiences with its action, its futuristic look, and its vision of the world as a controlling digital construct put in place by a superior power. If critics and viewers failed...
View ArticleLars Von Trier Destroys the World in 'Melancholia'
As is typical of the Danish writer/director Lars Von Trier's mature work, Melancholia is masterful, visually sumptuous, surprising, and provocative. But as has been typical of Trier’s work all along,...
View ArticleMen Obsessed: Three New Documentaries Demonstrate the High Price of Excellence
Everybody knows Elmo. Everybody loves Elmo. (C’mon, even if he gets on your nerves, you can’t really hate him.) But nobody knows anything about the man behind Elmo, or at least they didn’t until...
View Article'House of Pleasures' and 'Sleeping Beauty' Consider the World's Oldest...
If there’s anything the movies love more than a hitman, it’s a hooker. It sometimes seems that the oldest profession is one of the most common professions onscreen, a blank canvas for filmmakers to...
View ArticleNew Documentary Celebrates the Low-Budget Art of Exploitation Maestro Roger...
By the mid-’50s, Corman was scraping up tiny budgets for lurid horror films such as It Conquered the Earth and Attack of the Crab Monsters, which he would shoot in days (usually less than a week) and...
View ArticleHBO's 'Girls' Isn't the New 'Sex and the City' (Yet)
Mumblecore Sex and the City—that’s an easy way to describe HBO’s new series Girls, but it’s also an accurate one. Critics can talk about the show’s creator, 25-year-old Lena Dunham, as being the new...
View ArticleSubtle Undercurrents Run Through Arthouse Dramas 'Domain' and 'Certified Copy'
Domain, Patric Chiha’s debut feature, has its facile moments, but Beatrice Dalle’s forceful yet contained performance runs like a third rail through the director’s patient storytelling, unobstrusively...
View ArticleHockey Comedy 'Goon' Tries to Rise Above Sports-Movie Cliches
Goon wishes badly that it weren’t a typical sports movie. Co-written by Evan Goldberg and Jay Baruchel, the hockey comedy clearly emulates/aspires to Slapshot, the profane, cynical 1977 flick that...
View Article'My Joy' and 'Once Upon a TIme in Anatolia' Detour Around Road-Movie Cliches
Funny how often driving scenes in movies don’t really take you anywhere. They bring characters into two-shot-friendly proximity and provide the semblance of action while dialogue plays out, but what...
View ArticleTwo Rare Spaghetti Westerns Exemplify Gritty Italian Filmmaking of the ’60s
The stylistic legacy of director Sergio Leone and his less-celebrated muchachos extends into the present day, not least in Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming pasta-faux-zool Django Unchained. But there...
View ArticleKenneth Lonergan Gives Viewers Plenty to Talk About With Two Cuts of His...
Margaret is a masterpiece. Margaret is a debacle. It’s the follow-up from hell, the vindication of an exacting filmmaker, a potential career-crippler. It’s indulgent and “arty,” and it’s brisk and...
View ArticleDog Days: Our Critic Suffers Through the Late-Summer Dregs of Home Video So...
There comes a time every summer when the home-entertainment enthusiast finds him- or herself at a loss, surveying the options for a wind-down flick and finding them wanting. Or maybe this only happens...
View ArticleTwo New Documentaries Look at the Dramatic Lives of Bob Marley and Bobby...
Bob Marley remains one of the best-known people on the planet, even 31 years after he left it. But all the namechecks and merchandising have left him seeming like more of an icon than a mere mortal, or...
View ArticleTwo Different Approaches To Murder: 'The Snowtown Murders' and 'Kill List'
Poverty, broken windows, broken family structures, substance abuse—you know the story. As The Snowtown Murders unfolds, this based-on-actual-events tale takes an even more disturbing turn. Casual...
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