In 1941, with financial woes mounting and an animators’ strike making his studio anything but the happiest place on earth, Walt Disney took President Franklin D. Roosevelt up on the offer to be a cultural ambassador to Latin America. For the United States, it was a chance to woo potential…
Ostensibly, Free Style is one of those uplifting family movies built around a niche sport à la 1993’s rollerblading cash-in Airborne, with an underdog realizing dreams against the odds. Veteran family fare hack William Dear (Harry and the Hendersons!) does a decent job of fetishizing motocross, with motorcycles splattering dirt all over…
The Invention of Lying’s plot hook sounds like a pile-up of Jim Carrey-Tom Shadyac concept comedies. The assumption is that there isn’t much crossover between the Liar, Liar and Ricky Gervais fanbases. Gervais’ fuzzy parable exists in an alternate universe where nobody has made a word for “truth” because nobody…
The ushers at a packed screening of Michael Moore’s latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, came proudly decked out in T-shirts bearing slogans like “Make Love, Not Capitalism” and “Capitalism, We Have a Problem.” The shirts and the movie are brought to you by those filthy Reds: Overture Films, which…
“Everything I write ends up being about loneliness,” said the late writer David Foster Wallace in a 1999 interview on the radio show Bookworm. In that conversation, Wallace was trying to get at the core of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, a four-part short story he wrote as a…
Amreeka The thriving subgenre of immigrant displacement dramedy gets a confident new spin from Cherien Dabis, a Palestinian-Jordanian raised in the United States. Divorced, demoralized and struggling with her weight, Palestinian bank employee Muna (a very good Nisreen Faour) leaves the occupied West Bank with her teenage son, Fadi (Melkar…
Paris Paris, as overdocumented as any great city, still has new facets to reflect. For proof, see Claire Denis’ idiosyncratically observed 35 Shots of Rum—a contrast to Cedric Klapisch’s Paris panorama, an encyclopedia of “types” and banal C’est la vie lessons. When an ensemble film works, you welcome the shifts…
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Tucker Max got famous through a Web site detailing how being an asshole to women constantly got him laid, making him a hero to frat boys and a demon to everyone else who noticed. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, adapted from…
The Other Man Whatever initial life there might have been in a story by German writer Bernhard Schlink (The Reader) has been crushed to a pulp by writer-director Richard Eyre (Notes on a Scandal) in this flat thriller about a software executive (Liam Neeson) hunting down the lover of his…
As evidenced by The Informant!, it’s a hell of a tricky thing turning real-life pulp into floss sugar. The story of Archer Daniels Midland biochemist-exec-turned-crooked-federal-snitch Mark Whitacre is a tragicomedy. Journalist Kurt Eichenwald spent five years trailing the bipolar fuck-up, and his 2000 book, The Informant, is so densely, richly…
Set in the bucolic suburbs of early 19th-century London, as fresh and dewy as a newly mowed lawn, Jane Campion’s Bright Star recounts the love affair between a tubercular young poet and the fashionable teenager next door. It’s more conventionally romantic than wildly Romantic—but no less touching for that. Fanny…
Early in Shane Acker’s computer-animated debut feature 9, a diminutive anthropomorphic whatsit with wooden hands, copper fingers and the titular numeral emblazoned on his chest awakens to the lifeless body of his human creator and sets forth into a decimated industrial landscape—all twisted metal and smokestacks—that calls to mind London…
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…
Mike Judge began writing the screenplay for Extract not long after Office Space opened and closed in a matter of weeks in the late winter of 1999. The two movies were always intended as bookends, with Extract countering the earlier film’s woe-is-me tale of the put-upon prole with its fucked-am-I…
It Might Get Loud
Marketed as a guitar summit between The Edge, Jimmy Page and Jack White, Davis Guggenheim’s affectionate, intermittently insightful behind-the-music doc is more electric triptych than meeting of the minds. Yes, the trio gather ’round the soundstage amps to teach each other a few tricks, but it’s anticlimactic—save for the schoolboy…
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…
Finally, there’s a vampire movie worthy of the title The Hunger—even if it arrives under the more potable name Thirst. Carnal appetite, not a parched palate, is the accelerant that fuels this perverse, prankish and merrily anti-clerical exercise in bloodletting from Park Chan-wook, the South Korean director whose films function…
Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is consummate Hollywood entertainment—rich in fantasy and blithely amoral. It’s also quintessential Tarantino—even more drenched in film references than gore, with a proudly misspelled title (lifted from Italian genre-meister Enzo Castellari’s 1978 Dirty Dozen knockoff) to underscore the movie’s cinematic hyperliteracy. Tepidly…
Sophie Barthes’ clever metaphysical comedy Cold Souls has been dubbed “Being Paul Giamatti” more than once since its Sundance 2009 debut. But if comparisons to the films of Charlie Kaufman are inevitable, the similarities only go so far. Sure, Paul Giamatti plays “Paul Giamatti,” another “real” actor unwittingly embroiled in…
In the same week that the South African import District 9 gives us a Johannesburg beset by alien invaders, the latest film by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki envisions a small Japanese port town turned upside-down by visitors from the bottom of the sea. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The…
The aliens have been with us for 20 years already at the start of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mothership and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the space…
