In the same way novels can be better and worse than journalism at processing history, so can movies be better and worse than novels: too unreal yet too specific. For the movie of Mohsin Hamid’s novel, director Mira Nair mounts a sensitive retrospective procedural of radicalization: Here’s how a bright…
The biggest puzzlement of these early days of the festival comes from Sofia Coppola, one of my favorite working directors. Until now, I have loved every one of Coppola’s movies: I love her sure and delicate touch, and she’s better than any other contemporary filmmaker at capturing the greatness of…
One of the most exciting things about attending the Cannes Film Festival is being among the first people to see the films the world will be talking about. That’s one of the terrible things, too: There’s no one to warn you when you’re about to see a puppy murder, a…
François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful, a portrait of a 17-year-old French call girl, is something else again. This is another story about a family in crisis: Isabelle (played by Marine Vacth, a stunning-looking if ultimately inert actress) is a student who still lives at home with her mother, stepfather, and…
Nearly everyone I know who has seen the official poster for the 66th Cannes Film Festival — a bird’s-eye view of a kiss between a young Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward — has been crazy about it. The couple’s lips meet in the center of a perfect sunburst. She’s two…
If there’s one character Brady Corbet runs the risk of being typecast as, it’s the creep. Corbet pushed the edge of creepdom in Michael Haneke’s Hollywood remake of Funny Games, where he played one of two homicidal preppy kids who slowly torture and murder a family vacationing at their Long…
What’s worse than a handful of drunk, plastic, self-obsessed, quarrelling women with too much time on their expertly manicured hands? A handful of drunk, plastic, self-obsessed, quarelling brides. And if there’s any reality left in Bravo’s Real Housewives of Miami reality series, that’s exactly what we can all expect when…
Don’t be surprised if this weekend, the city seems lousy with film crews. Fear not: there is not a pandemic of Kardash-ococcus spreading through Miami. Rather, the 48 Hour Film Project begins tonight. Teams of filmmakers will be given 48 hours to make a short film in one of 15…
On the left, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan in the 2013 version, and Mia Farrow in the same role in 1974.Anyone who’s familiar with the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford should recognize the scenes and shots from trailers for the 2013 version, which opens Friday with…
The Great Gatsby, With DiCaprio and Maguire: Great but Not Always Good
Would you sign on for three months in shark-infested waters on a tippy raft under a captain who can’t swim? The shrewdest joke in Kon-Tiki’s surefire story — about Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,000-mile South Pacific expedition to prove that ocean-faring Incans could have settled Tahiti — is that practically every character…
In the House Takes the Thriller Apart to Build It Anew
A trashy vampire flick in art film drag, Kiss of the Damned satisfies on neither level. Drawing on a host of Euro-horror influences including but far from limited to a synth score reminiscent of Dario Argento’s Goblin-performed soundtracks, Xan Cassavetes’s pastiche follows lonely bloodsucker Djuna (Josephine de la Baume) as…
“It’s right out of a cheap melodrama,” one character remarks in From up on Poppy Hill, after a particularly extreme twist of fate — yet this film’s gentle storytelling manages to extract the emotional payoffs of melodrama without ruining one’s suspension of disbelief. A film about fathers and children, and…
Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s: The 1 Percenters in Their Lair
The Angels’ Share Takes on Class Issues Via Whiskey
In the course of reviewing movies in the early 2000s, just as computer-generated special effects were becoming radically sophisticated and were also, increasingly, becoming the chief selling point of big-ticket movies, I more and more often found myself invoking the name “Ray Harryhausen.” He died on Tuesday, May 7, 2013…
In his new film, the social drama At Any Price, director and co-writer Ramin Bahrani examines how the transformation of food into intellectual property through seed patents has corrupted, impoverished, or dissolved the American family farm. As with the Iranian-American director’s previous films (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo),…
Uwe Boll will no longer fight you — at least, not with his fists. Often lambasted by critics as the worst of the worst, Boll once literally got into the boxing ring with four film bloggers, but these days prefers to combat negative press with what he claims are more…
A big winner at last year’s SXSW, Gimme the Loot is a pocket-size Bronx indie with the wispiest of narrative ideas: A couple of teen graffiti bombers decide to gain fame by tagging the Mets’ Home Run Apple. Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington) are mates only in spraying,…
The only thing we English teachers hate more than Sparknotes is a high quality, mostly faithful movie version of a book. Why would a student slog through Pride and Prejudice when she can drool over Colin Firth in the excellent BBC miniseries? And shh! Don’t tell the eighth graders about…
Upscale parties. Couture gowns. Top-shelf booze at exclusive restaurants. These are the kinds of things we associate with the faaaahbulous lifestyles of Bravo’s Real Housewives series. But according to a report in OK Magazine, the Miami housewives’ lives are a little more shabby chic. Of all six Real Housewives franchises,…
