There is something oddly familiar about Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, in which George Clooney plays a commitment-phobic business traveler with no use for meaningful human interaction. Could have sworn we’ve been here before. When was it? Oh, yes, of course: Joel and Ethan Coen’s Intolerable Cruelty, released in…
The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem—in which a father and his 10-year-old son traverse a despoiled landscape of unspeakable horror—was a quick, lacerating read. John Hillcoat’s literal adaptation, which arrives one Thanksgiving past its original release date is, by contrast, a long, dull slog. Fidelity to…
Given his preference for static, symmetrical, scrupulously color-coordinated and art-directed compositions, it’s less surprising that Wes Anderson has gotten around to directing an animated feature than that it took him this long to do it. Likewise, if Anderson—a nostalgia merchant whose ostensibly contemporary films always seem to be unfolding in…
Lars von Trier’s doggedly outrageous, fearsomely ambitious two-hander is so desperate to make you feel something—if only a terrible sensation of nothingness—that it’s almost poignant. Most simply put, Antichrist revels in the gruesome ordeal of a bereaved couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who lose their toddler because they were…
Bella: I’m coming. Edward: I don’t want you to. —The Twilight Saga: New Moon Worry not for the purity of your tween girls, global mothers. Where Catherine Hardwicke’s lively, irreverent take on the first book in the Twilight series at least made room for a few suggestive winks, the sequel…
Another poor, massive, uneducated black teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, The Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile and ever-grateful to…
Seven months after its theatrical release in the U.K., and two months after its DVD debut there, Pirate Radio washes ashore in U.S. theaters with a different title (it was formerly known as The Boat That Rocked) and most of its better bits excised. Writer-director Richard Curtis, paying homage to…
Completing his multi-film vendetta against the world’s tourist trade, German-born director Roland Emmerich sends the mother of all storms to level the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower and a priest-filled Vatican City, among other locales, in his newest end-times thriller, 2012. From Independence Day (1996) to The Day After Tomorrow…
In her broad outlines, Claireece Precious Jones risks sounding like the epitome of ghetto cliché: an obese, illiterate 16-year-old; mother to a 4-year-old Down syndrome daughter and now pregnant again; physically and psychologically abused by her mother; repeatedly raped by her father, who is also the father of her own…
The secret is out. Warner Bros. waited to unwrap The Box until two days before its opening because, compared to its madcap predecessors—the psychotic Holden Caulfield update Donnie Darko and the delirious welcome-to-the-21st-century extravaganza Southland Tales—the new Richard Kelly movie is basically a sock of coal for Christmas. A mysterious…
It’s not hard to see how the director of Forrest Gump would be thought a good fit to adapt the dearly beloved Dickens tale that has survived nearly two centuries of retelling. Stuffed with simple souls winning over a stingy misanthrope to the view that life is a box of…
Historical cataclysm produces conspiratorial thinking: Germany’s loss in World War I, the JFK assassination and 9/11 are all naturally understood as the stuff of unimaginable plots, unspeakable cover-ups and unseen forces. The guys who made The Men Who Stare at Goats can’t quite decide whether this syndrome is risible or…
Less documentary than closely and manipulatively edited homage to the new-agey “genius” of frequent Michael Jackson collaborator and High School Musical auteur Kenny Ortega, This Is It is about as honest as the song it’s named after—which was co-written with and then stolen from Paul Anka in 1983, sold to…
Apart from the stray slasher flick, Halloween is traditionally a dead spot on the Hollywood calendar. This week’s big release? The Michael Jackson tribute film This Is It—creepy in its own right. But Universal Studios has been raiding its catacombs for DVD reissues. Let’s brush the cobwebs aside. Conventional wisdom…
The title is a double entendre in An Education, the film version of British journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir about the crash course she received in the “university of life” while studying for her A-levels in early-1960s suburban London. So, too, is Danish director Lone Scherfig’s movie something of a deceptively…
Like the ominous fingernail moon early on in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, the bloodsucker trend is again in a waxing phase thanks to the mass cult followings of the Twilight saga and HBO’s True Blood. However, the only authentic vampires in this first (and, I can all but…
Billed as a “collective feature film,” New York, I Love You is the second in the “Cities of Love” series. As with its predecessor, Paris je t’aime, there are hits and misses. Producer Emmanuel Benbihy decreed that each of the 11 segments be set in a specific neighborhood, but only…
The movie wastes no time: Before the opening credits, a man watches two home invaders slaughter his wife and daughter—and we don’t even know their names. And then: Deals are cut, the murderer walks while his less culpable accomplice is sentenced to death, and the dad wonders, “But what about…
Founded by self-described urban guerrillas Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, the Red Army Faction were the Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army and righteous outlaws of Bonnie and Clyde combined—robbing banks, planting bombs, shooting cops and assassinating judges for the better part of the decade that followed the convulsions…
Directed by Spike Jonze from a 400-word children’s picture book first published in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are may be the toughest adaptation since Tim Burton fashioned Mars Attacks! from a series of bubblegum cards. Tougher, actually: Burton was working with ephemeral, anonymous trash; Jonze is elaborating on a…
In the Oscar derby for Best Actor, is it better to die or to grieve? Clive Owen opts for the latter route in this strained, sentimental adaptation of a memoir by widowed English journalist Simon Carr. His 2001 book—boozy, breezy and thoroughly unsystematic—was a precursor to the new laissez-faire parenting…
Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel gives us Belle Époque Coco, opening in 1893 with a grim scene of the 10-year-old waif and her sister unceremoniously dumped at an orphanage and ending around World War I, a few years before the Chanel empire is launched. Jan Kounen’s moldy Coco Chanel &…
