Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A lonely dwarf, a wisecracking Cuban-American, and a grieving mother walk into each other’s lives, laugh together, cry together, grow, change, and heal each other’s emotional wounds. Cue Sundance prizes, Miramax pickup, torrent of glowing reviews, and surprisingly robust indie box office…
For a movie built around questions of failed ethics and duplicitous behavior, Street Kings is just as dishonest as its characters. Though conceived as yet another sobering frontline report on law enforcement’s ever-expanding gray area, director David Ayer’s grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense…
Smart people got no reason to live — and, sure, that’s not quite how Randy Newman sang it, but the point stands. Because in Noam Murro’s directorial bow — one of those Sundance premières starring famous people slumming in dingy Indieland — the smart people ain’t doing much l-i-v-i-n’ at…
When Time recently featured George Clooney on its cover accompanied by the headline “The Last Movie Star” you didn’t have to read the article to know where it was coming from. After all, stars of the post-pubescent variety are an increasingly rare commodity these days, whereas Clooney, in just about…
Mick Jagger’s most essential physical feature, according to Martin Scorsese: his bellystache. On the poster for Shine a Light, the big-shot director’s Rolling Stones concert film, Sir Mick is frozen in mid-song aerobics, his back arched, his half-shirt raised, that yawning navel and faint hairline more prominently showcased than his…
Do we need another look back at the rotten heart of the ’50s nuclear family? Ira Sachs thinks we do, and as one who can’t get enough of sweaty melodramas about rotting families, I’m with him in principle. Mind you, Sachs’ new movie is less about families than about cheating…
Ben Mezrich’s 2002 bestseller Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions was a smart narrative about . . . well, you did see the subtitle, right? Mezrich more or less recounted a fantastic tale spun by an old acquaintance from Boston,…
Considering that the war in Iraq has proved to be Washington’s shot-by-shot remake of Vietnam, it’s only natural that Hollywood has followed suit, giving us a series of Iraq-themed films that can be set neatly alongside their Vietnam-era counterparts. Just as the initial wave of angry anti-Vietnam documentaries gave way…
As John Simon once said of Jeanne Moreau — cast in a virginal role — making Simon Pegg a fat guy is like casting Lassie as a vegetarian. Take Chris Elliott, subtract Don Knotts: the remainder is Pegg, the British actor-screenwriter who barely registered as an appetizer for Shaun of…
At the crosswalk the other day, I noticed something peeking out from the usual pasting of fliers on the light pole in front of me. It looked like an address label. In a nondescript typeface was printed: “OUT OF IRAQ” — a plea unlikely to persuade any policymakers who happened…
Rare is the star vehicle that is as poorly matched to its star as Drillbit Taylor, which casts Owen Wilson as a homeless Army deserter and con man, able to fool people into believing he’s both a substitute teacher and a master of hand-to-hand combat. It’s a part that requires…
Was Dr. Seuss oblivious to his own genius? The allegory of his charming Horton Hears a Who! remains fluid today and, like its crafty rhymes, ebbs and flows with the times. The conviction of an innocent pachyderm known as Horton to stand up against tyranny and for the survival of…
For the crime of obliterating high culture, for the crime of getting off on vicarious degradation — and, above all, for the crime of sitting through any movie that resembles the one he’s (re)made — Michael Haneke sentences you (me, us) to Funny Games. Scratch that: to a second helping…
To the uninitiated viewer, Austrian director Michael Haneke may best be described as the modern cinema’s master of the unkind rewind. In the opening scene of his second theatrical feature, Benny’s Video (1992), we see crude camcorder footage of a farm pig being shot with a cattle gun during a…
Near the beginning of The Counterfeiters, a fact-based Holocaust drama by Austrian filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky, we meet Jewish money forger and former jailbird Salomon Sorowitsch (brilliantly played by Karl Markovics), packing to flee Berlin in 1936 with a suitcase full of fake money. We know from an opening coda that…
Based on a true story” is what The Bank Job brags before diving into the clear blue water of the Caribbean, where, in 1970, a topless woman frolics with two swimming mates — just another day in paradise. The trio retires to a hotel room for a sweaty, breathless afternoon…
Semi-Pro’s much better than Blades of Glory, which wasn’t nearly as good as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which was a little better than Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which was almost as funny as Old School, which was better than everything else Will Ferrell had done…
“When you sleep with the king, it ceases to be a private matter.” And so it comes to pass that young Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson) must stand before her father, Sir Thomas (Mark Rylance), and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), and report the nitty-gritty details of having…
The Band’s Visit made headlines after being disqualified as Israel’s foreign-language submission to the 2008 Academy Awards — an ironic fate, indeed, for a movie that takes language as its very subject. The official ruling of the Oscar referees was that too much of the film’s dialogue is in English,…
Set in Salamanca, Spain, during an international counterterrorism summit, it depicts an assassination attempt on the president of the United States from the perspective of five witnesses and, in the movie’s pièce de résistance, the members of the terror cell responsible for the attack. It’s a cast of characters the…
Like most wanna-be heroes of the eager-to-please teen comedy, poor little rich boy Charlie Bartlett is charming and quirky. Too charming by half and not nearly quirky enough, as played by an artfully rumpled and wide-eyed Anton Yelchin. Blazered, briefcased, and blitzed, Charlie comes to us newly expelled from his…
The pleasures of Be Kind Rewind do not extend far beyond the promise of its premise: Jack Black, magnetized and manic (yawn), erases every single video tape in the rental store where he hangs out and has to reshoot the movies with pal Mos Def. Theirs becomes a ramshackle filmography…
