Compare and contrast Laurent Cantet’s terrific The Class with any of the following schoolroom chestnuts—Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dangerous Minds or To Sir, With Love. Note the structural similarities: misbehaving students, an educator who wants them to succeed and big thoughts about the classroom as urban microcosm. Discuss the difference between…
The smirky, overbearing and subliminally hostile romantic primer He’s Just Not That Into You—which sold a regrettable 2 million copies when it was published in 2004—seizes on some partial truths about the gender wars and blows them up into evolutionary gospel, as follows: Since cave-dwelling times, men have been programmed…
Will there be a special Academy Award for Best Aryan Costume Design this year? Everywhere you turn in the movies, it’s swastika flags and SS uniforms. Although the Holocaust movie has been on hiatus for a while, lately it seems as if everyone is trying to squeeze in their Schindler’s…
Like Doubt, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader is low-budget, high-profile and beamed straight at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Category of High Moral Tone. Only in this case, the stakes are way higher and the attitude muted to a fault. Based on a partly autobiographical novel by Bernhard…
Is it a sign of the apocalypse? Something in the water? Or is it just the way the wind is blowing?Whatever the case, when our often-contentious quintet of film critics put their heads together about the best movies of 2008, they managed to agree (more or less) on a dozen…
Back in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Boston, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn’t get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so I wasn’t altogether surprised…
You don’t have to have been raised on colonial Brit Lit, classic melodramas, Westerns or war movies, or Gone With the Wind to figure out the likely outcome of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia within its first 15 minutes, but any or all of the above will help. Tightly wound and corseted…
With his blazing white coat and pig-pink ears, to say nothing of the zigzag of lightning cut into his flank, the eponymous canine lead of Disney’s lively new animated movie Bolt looks a little bit real and a whole lot not. That’s not a failure of craft: Goofy and sweet…
I’ve Loved You So Long Kristin Scott Thomas has gotten so locked into playing tragic victims or frigid grandes dames that few remember the actress got her big break as a wistfully amused friend in Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, or that she played Plum Berkeley on Absolutely…
Those who believe that Jonathan Demme went all soft with Philadelphia and never recovered may not be reassured by his latest movie, an ensemble tale of family pathology gussied up with vérité camera work, world music, and improvising actors both trained and not. You can find the worst and the…
On a double bill with L.A. Confidential, Chinatown or just about any film made after 1970 about institutional corruption in Los Angeles, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, a period drama based on a 1928 Los Angeles missing-child case, would come off as faintly geezer-ish noir lite. As LAPD scandals go, the case…
A young woman fights off her brutal husband; a gun goes off; a marble spins on the floor where a toddler sits unattended. From B-movie beginnings, The Secret Life of Bees, a family drama set in the civil-rights-era South, chugs along pleasantly like a television special tailored for the crossover…
When I heard that Quentin Tarantino handed the Grand Jury Prize for best feature to Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, telling the audience that the movie “put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame,” my jaw went…
Notwithstanding all the pundit-driven hot air about the horrors of being young in today’s America, I’m willing to buy the argument that it’s getting harder to survive those years, if only because there’s so much more for the poor dears to worry about—more information, more technology, more stuff to consume,…
Making notes in 1949 for a review of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell wrote that “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be…while holding untenable opinions.” Which is a nice way of saying that Waugh, a world-class satirist of everyone from the rich down, was also…
I’ve always enjoyed ABBA—not in that post-hoc, so-bad-it’s-good hip way, but innocently, the way I like Phil Spector. To this day, howling along in my car to that echoing, cascading, multiply overdubbed wall of sound makes me feel like a member of some dippy but joyous cathedral choir. So I…
To my 10-year-old daughter, the term “American Girl” means “that store my meanie of a mom—unlike all the other, higher-quality moms—won’t let me go near.” Why should I? She hates dolls, and I—creeped out by row upon row of homogenized mannequins with staring, Stepford Wife eyes and designer threads—get nauseated…
Behold Adam Sandler, in a passable Israeli accent and outsize codpiece, as Zohan the Mossad super-heavy: catching barbecued fish in his butt crack on a Tel Aviv beach, repelling bullets with his nostril, sculpting hand grenades into toy poodles for delighted Palestinian children while making mincemeat of an Arab terrorist…
Halfway through Surfwise, a mesmerizingly ambivalent documentary about an itinerant family of Jewish surfer-dude health nuts, we meet the 84-year-old patriarch, “Doc” Paskowitz, at Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance, showing director Doug Pray a blown-up photo of a Nazi preparing to shoot a Jewish mother and child at close range…
Oh, please—spoiler alert? Fine, I won’t tell you whether Carrie Bradshaw ties the knot with Mr. Big, even though you’ve already seen that gown winging its way around the Web. Given the Sex and the City vibe, some fans might be more interested in whether the frock—which looks as though…
Things never happen the same way twice.” Thus boometh Aslan the lion (Liam Neeson), alias the Son of God, popping his computer-generated shaggy head briefly into The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian to pep-talk a bunch of discouraged Brits into fighting the good fight again. As in life, so in…
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’ noticeably childless new movie is less about families than…
