There is a great deal of prowling motion in Insidious: a recurring sideways dolly outside an ominous house, a trenchcoat-clad cacodemon pacing outside a second-story window. It’s the restless motion of a movie stalking its prey—you, dear viewer. A married couple, Josh and Renai (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne), are…
Last year, the question most often asked of Dallas International Film Festival artistic director James Faust was, “What’s this year’s The Hurt Locker?”—a reference, of course, to Kathryn Bigalow’s wrenching Iraq bomb-squad nail-biter that had one of its earliest screenings at the 2009 fest then called the AFI Dallas International…
With post-GoodFellas crime-movie tropes dyed for St. Patrick’s Day, this Ballad of Danny Greene attempts to enshrine the Irish-American strongman, a real-life folk hero among mob-lore nerds and Cleveland Teamsters for his Rasputin-like resilience through multiple assassination attempts. Kill the Irishman aims to come out bumping chests in upstart insouciance,…
The tale of a disoriented cannibal family trying to survive in the lower depths of Mexico City, Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are is a darkly comic social allegory as well as an atmospheric little genre flick. This promising first feature is nearly as apt to use the…
Paul Giamatti continues contemporary cinema’s longest pre-midlife crisis in Win Win as Mike, yet another schlubby fortysomething flummoxed by mundane personal problems. Mike is the coach of the county’s worst high school wrestling team, and his failing small-town law practice has accrued a mountain of debt, which he’s too chicken-shit…
If Jane Eyre is not the greatest of the Great Books with a permanent position on required-reading lists, it may be the most frequently filmed: At least 10 cinematic versions of the story have been made dating back to the dawn of the silent era—more, if you count made-for-TV adaptations…
Paul, it should be noted up front, is not the third installment in the so-called Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy featuring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, though there are indeed servings of both. Note the one key missing element: Edgar Wright, who directed and co-wrote with Pegg both the 2004…
A gleeful celebration of nonstop doping, Limitless offers up a dim Better Living Through Chemistry fantasy that refuses to rain on its own pill-popping parade. With long, disheveled locks and matching facial scruff, novelist Eddie (Bradley Cooper) struggles with writer’s block until he runs into his ex-brother-in-law Vernon (Johnny Whitworth)…
As devoid of spontaneity as a D.A.’s defense strategy, this adaptation of fiction machine Michael Connelly’s 2005 legal thriller is both convoluted and completely predictable, which fans at least should appreciate. The title refers to Mick Haller (Matthew McConaughey), an L.A. ambulance chaser who conducts business from the back of…
The eight gentle Trappist monks depicted in Of Gods and Men uphold the faith that brought them from France to Algeria, only to be abducted and massacred, presumably by fanatics of a rival religious persuasion. The movie, based on a 1996 event that continues to resonate in France, opens on…
The romanticized commitment-phobia that keeps Judd Apatow in gilt-fixtured man caves is brought down to earth (or Park Slope, anyway) in this inventive indie thriller from Murderball co-director Dana Adam Shapiro. Monogamy follows thirtysomething Brooklynite Theo (Chris Messina) as he simultaneously slogs through his day job as a wedding photographer,…
Who said animation should look real? Robert Zemeckis, for one, though as evidenced by Disney’s recent closing of his ImageMovers Digital studio, he increasingly appears to be alone in that sentiment. Mars Needs Moms stands as the potentially final Zemeckis-produced motion-capture effort, and like The Polar Express, Beowulf and A…
Cheerfully diffident, garrulous yet uninflected, blithely self-absorbed, the mumblecore brand proliferates: Last year’s star vehicles Greenberg and Cyrus introduced the concept of mega-mumble. The low-budget musical Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench pioneered mumble-chord; Tiny Furniture was part psycho-drumble, part sit-cumble. Premiering with the latter at last spring’s South…
Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries but rarely do, Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy metafictive upshot. It begins with context: In 2000, Mark Hogancamp, an Upstate New York…
In Bourne Ultimatum screenwriter George Nolfi’s directorial debut The Adjustment Bureau (an extremely loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1954 short story “Adjustment Team”), Matt Damon plays David Norris, a Brooklyn-born, bar-fight-prone congressman rocketing to the front of a Senate race apparently on the strength of his charisma and the…
Ink still wet on his MIT degree, Matt Franklin (Topher Grace) is back in hometown Los Angeles, waiting for his future to clarify itself while he loiters behind the counter at Suncoast Video, hawking VHSes of Harry and the Hendersons because it’s, like, totally 1988. Inspiration comes when Matt re-encounters…
Rick and Fred (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) are two domesticated husbands whose long marriages (to Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate, respectively) have achieved somnolent routine in suburban Providence, Rhode Island. Yet the wives worry. Rick is a girl watcher; Fred masturbates in the privacy of their parked Honda Odyssey…
Leanly scripted, directed for maximum tension, fast moving, and filled with a surprising amount of droll humor, writer-director Will Canon’s Brotherhood (co-written with Doug Simon) illustrates the catastrophic consequences of boys being boys when group-think, machismo and the survival instinct all converge. When an ostensibly fail-safe fraternity initiation (robbing a…
It would be unwise to consider Four Lions a movie that has much to say about radical Islam or the threat of terrorism. Instead, think of Four Lions as Airheads, except that instead of the idiots wanting to get their song played on the radio, the idiots want to blow…
Fifty years after Kim Ki-young’s postwar hothouse original, Im Sang-soo attempts a sleek, breathless update to The Housemaid, the tale of a household riven by a sexy domestic. This time around, instead of a family-man music teacher getting ensnared, a bored, feckless maid (Jeon Do-yeon) is seduced by a rich…
Rule of law scarcely discourages the endless reprisals in Rachid Bouchareb’s Algerian War–era family-ties drama Outside the Law, which shows the FLN’s militant campaign for Algerian independence, as fought on French soil, through the experiences of three brothers. Reuniting in a Nanterre shantytown, this tattered family brings with it the…
Fresh from Sundance, Miguel Arteta’s amiable Cedar Rapids is a mild comedy of embarrassment, set in the dark heart of Middle America and starring sitcom secondario Ed Helms (The Office’s obnoxious angry salesman Andy Bernard) as Tim Lippe, a prematurely middle-aged man-child. Taking an airplane for the first time in…
