Midway through the amiable children’s movie Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, there comes a speech that I’ll wager writer-director Zach Helm had been saving for future use ever since he discovered the Bard. As pop philosophy goes, it’s bracing stuff: Paraphrasing King Lear, Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman), a 243-year-old “toy impresario”…
A doom-ridden pulp cabalist with a dark sense of purpose as well as humor, Richard Kelly shoots the moon with his rich, strange, and very funny sci-fi social satire, Southland Tales. Kelly’s debut, Donnie Darko, was the first post-millennial cult hit; his second feature, Southland Tales, achieved film maudit status…
Although he plays a college professor in his latest film, Robert Redford was, by his own admission, never much of a student, consistently more interested in what was going on outside the classroom window than inside. But there’s one moment from Redford’s academic past that burns brightly in his memory…
Jonathan Demme, who directed Tom Hanks to an Oscar as the AIDS-afflicted lawyer in Philadelphia, may be the most well-meaning filmmaker in Hollywood. Jimmy Carter, winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human…
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is less Sidney Lumet’s comeback than his resurrection. Three years after being presented a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the 83-year-old director comes forth with a violent family melodrama that is his strongest movie in at least two decades. Robustly directed from Kelly Masterson’s bear-trap screenplay…
“There’s a reason I’ve had some good pictures and other guys will never have good pictures,” Sidney Lumet says matter-of-factly on a recent afternoon in his New York office — four cramped white walls, unadorned by awards or other memorabilia, on the top floor of the Ansonia building, where Enrico…
“Hold still.” That’s what the hunters say to the hunted in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. The first time we hear it, it’s the out-of-work Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) whispering optimistically to the antelope he spies through his rifle sight while perched on the crest…
Banking on the career choices of Vince Vaughn garners increasingly erratic returns, which is ironic, given that he has finally settled on (or surrendered to) a consistent onscreen persona: his own bad self. Uneasy from the beginning, Vaughn avoided the superstardom that seemed within reach after Swingers by trying on…
Wristcutters: A Love Story, a well-wrought indie written and directed by Goran Dukic, has to be the kewpie doll of current zombie flicks: Its walking dead are a bunch of attractive slackers whose wounds are largely internal. They’ve got attitude. Before the opening credits end, the movie’s glum protagonist has…
Less a war drama than a set of dueling position papers, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs may be the gabbiest movie ever made about American foreign policy — and it wasn’t even written by Aaron Sorkin. Hot young screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is fresh off his alpha-male script for The…
Alas, there’s only so much you can do with talking bugs that hasn’t already been covered in A Bug’s Life, Antz, and The Ant Bully — though hooking up Seinfeld’s buzzed-cut Barry B. Benson with a hottie human voiced by Renée Zellweger is a first, sort of a new spin…
American Gangster is a movie with obvious gravitas and a familiar argument: Organized crime is outsider capitalism. As archetypal as its title, Ridley Scott’s would-be epic aspires to enshrine Harlem dope king Frank Lucas in Hollywood heaven, heir to Scarface and the Godfather. Or, as suggested by the Mark Jacobson…
John Cusack, who more or less began his career sneaking a peek at Molly Ringwald’s panties in Sixteen Candles, has finally become an onscreen daddy — took only, what, 23 years? But he’s not exactly the most fortunate family man in film: First, in Martian Child he plays a widower…
“I hope people ask me, ‘Where did you find that local actress?'” Ben Affleck told Amy Ryan when he cast her as a wreck of a single mother in his directing debut, Gone Baby Gone. When Ryan showed up on the Boston set in ratty hair, muddy makeup, and a…
Rick McCallum had nothing to do with the original Star Wars. He was just 23 years old when it was released in 1977 and chasing his first job in the film industry. So, please, don’t age him unnecessarily: “I’m portrayed as 70 years old on the Internet because somebody thinks…
Dan in Real Life has this much going for it: It is not the worst Steve Carell film of 2007. That honor, of course, goes to Evan Almighty, which even the Lord walked out of during the second reel. Fact is, Dan in Real Life isn’t really much of a…
Before he snagged the lead in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1972 screen version of Anthony Shaffer’s 1970 stage play Sleuth, Laurence Olivier had, with his customary diplomatic finesse, dismissed the source material as “a piece of piss.” Two movie adaptations later, I’m inclined to agree with that assessment. Still, it’s not…
I gave up after about 100 pages of John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel Reservation Road, a typically overwritten and contrived slice of mass-market literary pabulum that hopscotches between the points-of-view of three people — the grieving mom, the grieving dad, and the perpetrator — involved in the hit-and-run death of…
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Raymond Chandler wrote in 1950’s The Simple Art of Murder, smacking the ascot off the drawing-room mystery and all its crime-solving dilettante dandies. “He must be . . . a man…
Scene by scene, This Is England gets the job done. Drawing on memories of a specific place and time — England in the early ’80s — writer-director Shane Meadows sketches with a keen eye for detail and the contours of experience. He nails the look and feel of a shabby…
Late in Rendition, in case you’ve been blind and deaf enough not to have cottoned to the drift, a tense Washington exchange on the legitimacy of bundling dark-skinned Americans off to secret prisons abroad takes place. On one side is a driven young senatorial aide (Peter Sarsgaard), on the other…
Killer timing! Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), Jason Kohn’s vivid, lean, and hungry documentary about São Paulo’s fatalistic food chain of extreme poverty, violence, unmitigated corruption, and overwhelming wealth arrived last month just as Vanity Fair’s “Viva Brazil!” issue hit the stands. Can’t we find a new country to fetishize?…
