Early in Shane Acker’s computer-animated debut feature 9, a diminutive anthropomorphic whatsit with wooden hands, copper fingers, and the titular numeral emblazoned on his chest awakens to the lifeless body of his human creator and sets forth into a decimated industrial landscape — all twisted metal and smokestacks — that…
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, secular worker-priests of the Belgian cinema, emerge once more from their lower depths. In describing one of their movies, you describe them all. Lorna’s Silence, like their five other features since 1992, was shot in French-speaking Wallonia, in their native province of Liège, the first industrial…
Mike Judge began writing the screenplay for Extract not long after Office Space opened and closed in a matter of weeks in the late winter of 1999. The two movies were always intended as bookends, with Extract countering the earlier film’s woe-is-me tale of the put-upon prole with its fucked-am-I…
As Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola’s baroque genealogical melodrama, reaches its appropriately hysterical denouement, Vincent Gallo fixes his pale gaze on young co-star Alden Ehrenreich and reassures him, “It’s going to be okay; we’re a family.” Gallo’s warmth is not altogether convincing, but for writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de…
Sophie Barthes’ clever metaphysical comedy Cold Souls has been dubbed “Being Paul Giamatti” more than once since its Sundance 2009 debut. But if comparisons to the films of Charlie Kaufman are inevitable, the similarities only go so far. Sure, Paul Giamatti plays “Paul Giamatti,” another “real” actor unwittingly embroiled in…
Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment — rich in fantasy and blithely amoral. It’s also quintessential Tarantino — even more drenched in film references than in gore, with a proudly misspelled title (lifted from Italian genre-meister Enzo Castellari’s 1978 Dirty Dozen knockoff) to…
Late in the infectiously frisky documentary The Cove, an older man calmly gate-crashes an international conference on whaling with a television screen strapped to his chest, showing bloody images of the mass slaughter of dolphins in a pretty cove off the coast of Japan. It’s a show-stopping publicity stunt by…
The aliens have been with us already for 20 years at the start of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mothership and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the space…
In the same week that the South African import District 9 gives us a Johannesburg beset by alien invaders, the latest film by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki envisions a small Japanese port town turned upside down by visitors from the bottom of the sea. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s…
It was the best of movies. It was the worst of movies. Which is to say: There’s half of a great movie in Julie & Julia — but since Meryl Streep has already starred in one titled Julia, perhaps it was merely necessary to tack on the “Julie” half to…
“When you bad,” boasts the young and beautiful, piss-and-vinegar-filled Muhammad Ali early in the documentary Soul Power, “you can do what you wanna do.” The film, which takes too long to get to the meat of its matter — but captivates once it does — is an addendum to Leon…
Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess that they’re too tired to procreate that night and then confess their mutual relief. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2 a.m…
After devoting his first two films as director, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, to getting laid and having kids, respectively, Judd Apatow brings the circle of life to a close with Funny People, which stars Adam Sandler as George Simmons, a popular, Sandler-esque movie star diagnosed with a rare…
On the surface, (500) Days of Summer really is no different from, oh, The Proposal, in which Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock spun box-office gold from romantic comedy’s refrigerator fuzz. Former music-video maker Marc Webb’s feature debut is as conventional as any made-for-cable rom-com, down to its soft-indie-rock soundtrack on…
In the lushly produced but dispiriting new comedy The Ugly Truth, Katherine Heigl stars as Abby Richter, a successful but hopelessly uptight TV producer who is also perpetually single. Ever efficient, Abby does background checks on the men she meets, and takes along on the first date a 10-point checklist…
Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering…
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…
