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…
It was the best of movies. It was the worst of movies. Which is to say: There’s half of a great movie in Julie & Julia—but since Meryl Streep has already starred in one titled Julia, perhaps it was merely necessary to tack on the “Julie” half to distinguish Nora…
As Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola’s baroque genealogical melodrama, reaches its appropriately hysterical denouement, Vincent Gallo fixes his pale gaze on young co-star Alden Ehrenreich and reassures him that “it’s going to be OK—we’re a family.” Gallo’s warmth is not altogether convincing, but for writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de…
I n the Loop doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the know. In Armando Iannucci’s movie, a satire of the run-up to war with a Middle Eastern country, it means that all the poor bastards are stuck in a loop, making the same bad decisions and tragic mistakes over and over…
After devoting his first two films as director, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, to getting laid and having kids, respectively, Judd Apatow brings the circle of life to a close with Funny People, which stars Adam Sandler as George Simmons, a popular, Sandler-esque movie star diagnosed with a rare…
In the lushly produced but dispiriting new comedy The Ugly Truth, Katherine Heigl stars as Abby Richter, a successful but hopelessly uptight TV producer who is also perpetually single. Ever efficient, Abby does background checks on the men she meets and takes along on the first date a 10-point checklist…
Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess that they’re too tired to procreate that night and then confess their mutual relief. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2 a.m…
Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering…
On the surface, (500) Days of Summer really is no different than, oh, let’s say The Proposal, in which Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock spun box-office gold from romantic comedy’s refrigerator fuzz. Former music-video maker Marc Webb’s feature debut is as conventional as any made-for-cable rom-com, down to its soft-indie-rock…
“Heterosexuals can’t understand camp, because everything they do is camp,” opined an associate of the old Playhouse of the Ridiculous, a New York theater known for its good-natured, anarchic sexual farce—a piece like Turds in Hell, which offered a farrago of sodomy, sadomasochism, incest, coprophagia, bestiality, homosexual behavior of every…
Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S…
Moon, directed by British advert tyro Duncan Jones, is a modest science fiction film with major aspirations. Jones’ debut is pleased to engage genre behemoths—2001, Solaris, Blade Runner—as well as B-movie classics such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The tale of a lonely spaceman might have made an excellent…
“They’re all about where people come from. Nobody seems to wonder where somebody’s going.” So says the Depression-era bank-robber-cum-folk-hero John Dillinger upon surveying the clientele of a chic Chicago eatery in a key scene from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. And, much like its subject, Mann’s exhilarating movie exists in a…
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a bewildering, noisy, sloppy, cynical piece of work, a movie that sneers at the audience for 147 minutes and expects us to lap it up as entertainment—and be grateful. This is blockbuster porn absent even the suggestion of care or concern for anything that…
Character is destiny—at least for Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. Allen’s exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia opens with a snatch of Groucho Marx singing his trademark paradoxical assertion (“Hello, I must be going”) and is powered almost entirely by the presence of a single, larger-than-life and less than likable figure. Whatever…
Fifteen minutes after seeing The Proposal, I’d forgotten I’d seen The Proposal. Well, that’s not entirely true: By then, it had simply merged in my memory with a thousand other films just like it—those in which phony lovers bound together by dubious circumstances become honest-to-kissin’ couples in just less than…
Enlighten Up! There are a number of tensions at play in Kate Churchill’s Enlighten Up!, a documentary about the proliferation of yoga as both spiritual path and commercial workout culture, and the vigor with which the believers will try to convert the skeptics. What’s frustrating about this otherwise friendly, lightweight…
Want to know how a city works? Start by watching 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a primer in which subway hijackers test how long it’ll take a million bucks to pass through Gotham’s plumbing. Turns out an hour is just enough time to roust the hated mayor…
Director Kirby Dick doesn’t actually stick his camera under any Capitol Hill bathroom stalls in the new documentary Outrage, but his goal is more or less the same: to catch conservative, family-values politicians with their pants down. Armed with a chorus of incriminating voices from across the alternative press and…
What Fletch was to plaid-checked water-cooler wits in the ’80s, what National Lampoon’s Van Wilder was to college-bound douches at the dawn of Dubya, that’s what 2003’s Old School is to Gen-X frat rats—a secret-handshake movie. A shaggy, intermittently hilarious wish-fulfillment nightmare about sorta dissatisfied, sorta middle-aged dudesters trying to…
Midway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers’ solipsistic, terminally-apologetic-for-being-solipsistic portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-slacker-messiah, the author, upon interviewing to become a cast member of MTV’s The Real World, makes the following observation about his generation of self-obsessed, media-savvy technobrats: “These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational,…
