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 that “it’s going to be OK—we’re a family.” Gallo’s warmth is not altogether convincing, but for writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de…
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…
“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 of every…
Moon, directed by British advert tyro Duncan Jones, is a modest science fiction film with major aspirations. Jones’ debut is pleased to engage genre behemoths—2001, Solaris, Blade Runner—as well as B-movie classics such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The tale of a lonely spaceman might have made an excellent…
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 likable figure. Whatever…
Made in U.S.A. Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. is not the celluloid holy grail, but it’s close enough. Four decades after its New York premiere in 1967, the least-seen, most quintessential movie of Godard’s great period lights up a screen at Dallas’ Angelika Film Center at 9:15 p.m. Friday as…
Kevin Macdonald’s Washington thriller is a bellows designed to puff up the most beaten-down reporter’s chest. Compressed from the highly regarded BBC miniseries first telecast in 2003, State of Play is an effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer. There are more than a few…
Pundits agree: The 2008 election has finally and forever rung down the curtain on America’s longest-running psychodrama, namely the Boomerography, aka the ’60s. The long, strange trip is finally over. Still, a few stories remain to be told or retold. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 marks a particular 40th anniversary—not Richard…
Martin Scorsese may be presenting Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, but this corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like Mean Streets cubed. Detailing daily life inside a criminal state, it’s a new sort of gangster film for America to ponder. Gomorrah takes its punning…
The most eagerly anticipated (as well as the most beleaguered) movie of the year (if not the century), Watchmen is neither desecratory disaster nor total triumph. In filming David Hayter and Alex Tse’s adaptation of the most ambitious superhero comic book ever written, director Zack Snyder has managed to address…
Modest but cosmic, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy is a movie whose sad pixie heroine, Wendy (Michelle Williams), already skating on thin ice, stumbles and, without a single support to brace herself, slides into America’s lower depths. Introduced calling for her dog, Lucy, Wendy loses first her liberty (briefly), then…
Ari Folman’s broodingly original Waltz With Bashir is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature. Folman has created a grim, deeply personal phantasmagoria around the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Waltz With Bashir, named for Bashir Gemayel, the hero of the Christian militias that…
And so the endless campaign wraps up with a flurry of virtual leaders. Richard Nixon will always be part of America’s dreamlife, with or without David Frost; the Bush II legacy will linger for years, even as W. addresses a yearning for closure. Like our president-elect, Milk arrives from left…
The Wrestler may be plenty visceral, but it’s no more a sports movie than professional wrestling is a competitive sport. Chronic overreacher Darren Aronofsky’s relatively unpretentious follow-up to the ridiculous debacle that was The Fountain is all about showbiz. It’s also a canny example. You want to make a comeback…
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…
I hear America singing, and I see…Richard Nixon. Not the man but the muse: Has any president since Lincoln inspired more movies, TV miniseries and operas? As Nixon’s beetle brows, ski nose and mirthless grin were made for caricature, so his rampant pathology was a gift for novelists and psycho-historians…
Gus Van Sant has never been what you’d call a risk-averse filmmaker, but he directs his Harvey Milk biopic so carefully there might be a Ming vase balanced on his head. Van Sant’s steps are deliberate, his posture is straight, his attitude is responsible and his eyes are fixed firmly…
Shown in the market last May at Cannes, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s JCVD garnered a surprise critical cult. Audiences, midnight or otherwise, may never warm to this low-budget whatzit, but Van Damme’s self-reflexive turn gave movie journalists plenty to mull over. Had Belgium’s contribution to international kick-sock-pow cinema been hanging out…
Arnaud Desplechin is a cinema maximalist: A Christmas Tale feels like all 12 days of seasonal merriment, and then some. This comic, ultimately touching family melodrama is a heady plum pudding of a movie—studded with outsized performances and drenched in cinematic brio. The concoction is over-rich, yet irresistible. It should…
W. may be less frenzied than the usual Oliver Stone sensory bombardment, but in revisiting the early ’00s by way of the late ’60s, this psycho-historical portrait of George W. Bush has all the queasy appeal of a strychnine-laced acid flashback. Hideous re-creations of the shock-and-awful recent past merge with…
The protag of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a modestly gaudy people’s heroine industriously repairing the social world, one frayed interaction at a time. After extended cameos in two previous Leigh films (as a resourceful pop tart in All or Nothing and the date-raped rich girl in Vera Drake), fine-boned Sally…
Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on flippancy. Given their refusal to take anything seriously—least of all the enthusiasm of their fans—the brothers surely got a chuckle from an upcoming academic tome, The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers: “Once again, Kierkegaard’s…
