The great boundary-crosser of Iranian cinema, Bahman Ghobadi, purposefully steps over the line with No One Knows About Persian Cats—a quasi-documentary, highly unofficial panorama of Tehran’s tenacious underground music scene and a movie that has accrued additional urgency since its first public screening at Cannes last May. Ghobadi’s co-writer, journalist…
As Iron Man 2 begins, Tony Stark—mechanical genius, Forbes 400 perennial, the pop-star CEO of Stark Industries—has dropped any pretense of a secret identity. Stark is garishly “out” as Iron Man, performing a one-man air show before touching down to host his Stark Expo, which transforms the World’s Fairground at…
I took the 6-year-old who lives in my house to the Sunday-afternoon sneak preview of Furry Vengeance. The boy’s a savvy consumer of kids’ popular culture—my greatest parenting triumph thus far. He knew from myriad Disney Channel commercials (the movie stars Matt Prokop of High School Musical 3) that Furry…
Watered-down Jungian analysis meets a GLAAD-approved weepie in Peter Bratt’s second feature, starring brother Benjamin (who also produces) as a swaggering, neck-tattooed macho who will finally realize the damage his rock-hard masculinity has caused during a funeral for a teenage gangbanger, his tears mixing with the rain as he flashes…
Writer Andy Diggle dedicated his snappy DC comic books The Losers to ’80s screenwriting superstar Shane Black, creator of the Lethal Weapon series. But in adapting The Losers for film, director Sylvain White and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Peter Berg strain to achieve the pleasurable mix of cheap laughs and…
Though the breathtaking vistas of Big Sky Country in Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s unforgettable sheep-herding documentary come close to heaven, it’s telling that AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” can be faintly heard over the sound of the electric contraptions that hired hands wield to shear the docile creatures, one of…
The Eclipse: The Eclipse is a curious Irish ghost story that fiddles with the recipe just enough to produce interesting results. Solidly built and middle-aged, Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds) isn’t the kind of vulnerable-looking nightgown-clencher usually cast to jump at bumps in the night. Working for a literary festival in…
The Joneses: For a while, at least, a pitch-black tale of our times: Four business partners masquerading as a happy family move into suburbia and sell their friends and neighbors on their early-adopter, newer-than-brand-new layaway lifestyle. David Duchovny, Demi Moore, Amber Heard and Ben Hollingsworth are the client-sponsored grifters; they…
The Perfect Game: Director William Dear now appears to be your go-to guy for forgettable, family-friendly baseball flicks. Following his Angels in the Outfield and The Sandlot: Heading Home is this Downy-soft, by-the-numbers biopic with Christian undertones about nine poor kids from Monterrey, Mexico, who became the first non-U.S. team…
The Secret of Kells: Brendan (voiced by Evan McGuire) is a medieval boy monk who dreams of illuminating sacred books. The carrot-topped lad possesses more imaginative brio than can be contained by the cloistered life he leads under the sternly overprotective eye of his disillusioned uncle, the Abbott (Brendan Gleeson),…
Vincere: According to Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere, Mussolini was nearly as much of a bully in the bedroom as he was in office. Il Duce would eventually get busy with the Pope, but in the mid-1910s, he screwed—and screwed over—one Ida Dalser, who becomes this epic melodrama’s nobly suffering Jeanne d’Arc…
Kick-Ass, the Matthew Vaughn-directed adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s graphic novel, sets itself up as an unadulterated exposé of the teenage mind. Tired of being mugged by high school thugs in a Manhattan that’s notably scummier than the real thing, our hero Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) wonders,…
Never mind the “international” part of the moniker Dallas International Film Festival, formerly known as AFI Dallas International Film Festival. It’s the homegrowns with which you should concern yourself as you fill out your movie-going schedule. Eat local, dig? This is what Michael Cain had in mind way back when…
“We are not these people! We are a boring couple from New Jersey!” complains Claire Foster (Tina Fey) to her husband, Phil (Steve Carell), about halfway through Date Night, the latest high-gloss, middle-to-low-brow would-be blockbuster from director Shawn Levy (Cheaper by the Dozen, Just Married). Phil and Claire are middle-class,…
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…
Sad, funny and acutely self-conscious, Noah Baumbach’s new movie is the sort of mordant character study that people imagine was common in the ’70s. Greenberg is unafraid to project a downbeat worldview or feature an impossible protagonist—I’d be hard put to name one as maddening as the eponymous antihero unless…
Lost boy John Hughes was inducted into the pantheon this month, when the Academy devoted a moving Oscar-night tribute to the departed writer-director. But do you actually remember being a teenage moviegoer in the 1980s? It wasn’t all some kind of wonderful. Hughes movies came out twice a year, if…
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…
There’s an obvious stunt element to the casting of The Runaways: a punked-up, barely legal Kristen Stewart and a still underage, barely dressed Dakota Fanning begging for street cred by playing dress-up as, respectively, Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, front girls of the oversexed ’70s-era teen proto-punk sensation, The Runaways…
In Pretty Woman, director Garry Marshall’s personal cinematic high score, the opening credits close (and the closing credits open) with the voice of a street freak, barely noticeable in wide shot, chanting an absurd mantra—”Welcome to Hollywood, land of dreams!” Twenty years later, Marshall dips into the same well to…
Though no one’s idea of an action film, Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax feels less charmingly aimless than its radically slight precursors Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2006). Have Bujalski’s feckless characters joined the workaday world? As its title suggests, Beeswax has a mild buzz of business—and busy-ness. Set in…
Agreeing at the insistence of a Corsican mob boss to suck and then slash a fellow inmate, newly jailed Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim)—poor, illiterate, a “dirty Arab” in the prison’s racist pecking order—gets what’s coming to him, but in a good way. Indeed, crime pays in A Prophet, the…
