The script, costumes and props of The Last Song work hard to establish Miley Cyrus’ dramatic-role bona fides as the 17-year-old crosses over from G to PG: Her character, constantly sneering high school grad Ronnie Miller, sports a tiny nose stud, stomps on the beach in Doc Martens, believes meat…
Matisse called the Barnes Foundation “the only sane place to see art in America.” But the clamor over moving one of the world’s foremost collections of impressionist, post-impressionist and modern art from its home in the bucolic suburb of Merion, Pennsylvania, to center city Philadelphia (4.6 miles away), has been…
Recent American films about families, like last year’s Rachel Getting Married and Revolutionary Road, all too often pierce eardrums with unrelenting shrieks of dysfunction and misery. Amid the din, French filmmaker Claire Denis’ sublime 35 Shots of Rum stands out all the more for its soothing quiet, conveying the easy,…
Another poor, massive, uneducated black teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, The Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile and ever-grateful to…
Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel gives us Belle Époque Coco, opening in 1893 with a grim scene of the 10-year-old waif and her sister unceremoniously dumped at an orphanage and ending around World War I, a few years before the Chanel empire is launched. Jan Kounen’s moldy Coco Chanel &…
When, in the early ’00s, I worked as a freelancer for a publication two floors below Vogue—this was pre-Devil Wears Prada—each sighting of Anna Wintour, no matter from how great a distance, was terrifying enough to immobilize me for a few seconds, leading to a sweaty paralysis when I found…
Your enjoyment of My One and Only will depend on how much the words “inspired by incidents in the life of actor and Hollywood icon George Hamilton” spark swoony memories. Star of Love at First Bite and Zorro, the Gay Blade, the Suntanned One executive-produced this benign coming-of-ager about the…
“If you remember Woodstock, you probably weren’t there,” the expression goes. And if you were, can you please stop gassing on about it? Aquarian Nostalgia™ is the most oppressively sanctimonious and dull stripe of reminiscing. Sure, the three free days of peace and music at Max Yasgur’s farm passed without…
Two weeks after jowly Matthew Perry transformed into pretty Zac Efron to relive his adolescence in 17 Again, Warner Bros. releases Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, another backward and backward-looking child-is-father-to-the-man rom-com, with Matthew McConaughey, who, 18 years Efron’s senior and slightly butcher, has just a few more years of prettiness…
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have transformed some of the saggiest, most clichéd genres with smarts, non-screechy politics, superb acting and visual beauty. Though, on paper, its premise could have easily elicited groans, Half Nelson—their 2006 feature debut (that Fleck directed and the two co-wrote) about a white middle-class Brooklyn…
The Confessions of a Shopaholic we need right now would be a handheld doc featuring former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain sobbing into the camera and begging the American public to forgive him for purchasing a $35,000 commode. With its curious release date—the film is meant to be Valentine’s Day…
Tom Tykwer’s The International is one of those movies in which shadowy men meet in parked cars, abandoned buildings and inconspicuous public spaces, travel under assumed names and always glance nervously over their shoulders, fearful of being spied on through a sniper’s lens. All tread carefully around potentially bugged telephones,…
