The Fighter is based on the true story of Lowell, Massachusetts, light welterweight champ “Irish” Micky Ward, but, starring Boston working-class hero Mark Wahlberg, it plays as a Rocky-fied fairy tale for our time: Consigned to Palookaville, a sweet, unassuming boxer with more heart than brains steps up—all the way…
A picnic for Anglophiles, not to mention a prospective Oscar bonanza for the brothers Weinstein, The King’s Speech is a well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor. The story—shy young prince helped by irascible wizard to break an evil…
Rock-bottom expectations are rewarded, sort of, in this update of Hanna-Barbera’s necktied ursus, which hopes to outdo the live action/computer animation success of the Alvin and the Chipmunks franchise by adding one more dimension. Yogi (who debuted in 1958 and was loosely based on The Honeymooners’ Ed Norton) is voiced…
Men follow Angelina Jolie in The Tourist. Men and cameras. They follow her — chic, coiffed, assless—through the streets of Paris. They follow her onto the train to impossible, floating Venice, where she heads on the instruction of her shadowy, fugitive lover. Eventually, they follow fellow passenger Johnny Depp as…
It’s taken almost two years for the bonkers, exhilarating same-sex romantic comedy I Love You Phillip Morris to finally reach theaters. Premiering at Sundance in January 2009, the movie was a near-casualty of nervous-nellie U.S. distributors—more comfortable with innocuous gay genres like the homosexual weepie or the martyr biopic—and countless…
A massive project, taken up lightly by Disney in the giddy post-Lord of the Rings atmosphere and dropped upon failing to return the requisite billions, this third adaptation from C.S. Lewis’s seven-volume (!) Chronicles of Narnia comes underwritten by a new studio, 20th Century Fox, and with a new director,…
In Yony Leyser’s documentary hagiography—which ends with John Waters nominating its subject for iconoclast-artist sainthood—William Seward Burroughs’ literary efforts are of secondary interest, noted for their influence on rock lyrics and band names. In the main, celebrity talking heads have gathered here to celebrate Burroughs’ life as an 83-year masterpiece…
Airily disregarding the Hemingway Unadaptability Principle, this quaintly racy version of Papa’s most hated novel has a few bullets in its barrel: Dynasty scion Jack Huston, as the Hem avatar, is dull but physically a perfect fit, the Mediterranean tourist-porn is addictive and the story, unique in this particular corpus,…
A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp—at the very least, it’s the most risible and riotous backstage movie since Showgirls. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake has had a spooky quality at least since Tod Browning appropriated a few bars of…
The usually silver-tongued Eliot Spitzer, political hero of last month’s Inside Job and now ubiquitous media personality, stammers and hesitates when asked to explain the psychosexual motivations behind his spectacular flameout in Alex Gibney’s gripping Client 9—or, if you prefer, Inside Blowjob. Spitzer, whose tireless efforts to redeem himself led…
“She doesn’t sing that way because she’s had it easy.” This is how Tess (Cher), the long-suffering owner of the nightclub at the center of Burlesque, defends her new star Ali (Christina Aguilera) to the club’s jealous deposed marquee attraction, Nikki (Kristen Bell). The same phrase could substitute as a…
“Great,” sighs the wicked witch in Tangled, a CG-animated spin on the Rapunzel story, “now I’m the bad guy.” Mother Gothel, the frizzy-haired, sharp-featured enchantress with the inimitable voice of Donna Murphy, is Disney’s first villainess whose chief crime is being an underminer, and the heroine of Disney’s 50th animated…
Everest looks suitably majestic in this IMAX documentary, though five different expeditions on the peak are awkwardly cobbled into one dubious narrative. At issue is whether, in 1924, George Mallory and his rope-mate reached the summit 30 years before credited first-timer Edmund Hillary. Mallory’s body was discovered in 1999 by…
Some young actors yearn for that flashy role in a blockbuster movie that will prove their bankability to a doubting Hollywood. Kristen Stewart, on the other hand, seems determined to accentuate her anti-star bona fides, delivering aggressively affectless interviews and bracketing this summer’s $300 million-earning Twilight: Eclipse with two grittier…
A teenage witch stands trembling behind her unsuspecting mother and father, wand raised. Obliviate, she whispers, and her parents’ eyes go glassy, their memories erased. On the mantel, the girl’s image disappears from the family’s photos. Blinking back tears, she walks into the street, the link between herself and her…
What if we choose to exist solely in a reality of our own making?” asks Pittsburgh community-college lit professor John Brennan (Russell Crowe) rhetorically during a discussion of Don Quixote in The Next Three Days, Paul Haggis’ fourth effort as director. Like his lumpy protagonist, Haggis, who also scripted this…
“I was recently sitting with a group of French directors, and at a certain point the conversation turned to Fred Wiseman,” critic Kent Jones wrote eight years ago in Film Comment. “Without hesitation, everyone agreed that he was probably America’s greatest living filmmaker”—not to mention the world-champion practitioner of the…
Other people besides James Franco appear in 127 Hours, but as they’re unimportant, they will not be mentioned in this review. Danny Boyle’s film—based on the story of Aron Ralston, who in 2003 cut off his own arm after being stuck for five days under a rock in a Utah…
In the climax of Morning Glory, Rachel McAdams is dressed in a flesh-colored, diaphanous cocktail dress, its halter top and tight bodice giving way to spilling tulle. This is the kind of dress a screen heroine wears when a slow-building love plot is coming to a head; it is the…
Though based on actual 2001 events in Ohio that caused an unmanned freight train laden with toxic waste to go haywire, Unstoppable could just as well be set in the shining sun of Reagan’s 1980s. As the conductor-less locomotive begins gathering speed across rural Pennsylvania, bedecked with autumn leaves, it…
The science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard-sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjorn Lomborg. Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the movie’s eponymous source book, the Danish adjunct professor of statistics became, over the past decade, a thorn in…
Around a Small Mountain travels with an itinerant one-ring circus of proud artisans, performing to shrinking rural crowds. “We’re the last classics,” announces one. And after a long and stubbornly marginal career heading his creative family, 82-year-old director Jacques Rivette nears closing time with this commedia dell’arte. Leads Sergio Castellitto…
