Screenwriter Steven Conrad writes movies about success and self-fulfillment in America — how we define it, the price we pay for it, and what it looks like depending on where you’re standing. In Conrad’s The Weather Man, the central figure was a vain TV news personality who had everything that…
Suggesting an American remake of David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s Them, The Strangers is practically an abstraction: an old-school spooker spun from the blood splatter on a wall, a nearby record player scratching an oldie, a CB radio in the garage, a creaky swing set in the back yard. First-time…
CANNES, France — Wading through 20-odd movies in half as many languages, each Cannes jury supplies its own dramatic narrative, to be interpreted according to its president’s presumed taste. Days before the 61st Cannes Film Festival ended, rumors were rife that the jury was having difficulties reaching consensus. As the…
Brazil’s big moment in the international cultural sun is still ahead of us. Hipsters might resist this assertion; after all, they’ve been onto Brazil since at least 2002, when Fernando Meirelles released Cidade de Deus (City of God), the Southern Hemisphere’s answer to The Godfather. All of a sudden, everyone…
Oh, please — spoiler alert? Fine, I won’t tell you whether Carrie Bradshaw ties the knot with Mr. Big, even though you’ve already seen that gown flying around on the web. Given the Sex and the City vibe, some fans might be more interested in whether the frock — which…
Boorish tae kwon do instructor Fred Simmons (Danny McBride) is a strip-mall hero for whom demonstrating his cinder-block-breaking skills to parking-lot gawkers is “my fucking life.” Fred takes seriously—or at least talks seriously about—the tenets of his combat technique while being completely oblivious to what’s happening just outside his storefront…
CANNES, France — No need for dreaming here. Each Cannes Film Festival generates its own metaphors for a 10-day regimen of visions in the dark. It’s impossible to forget, let alone transcend, one’s unnatural situation here. The opening film of Cannes’s 2008 edition clobbered participants with a cautionary allegory. Regardez:…
Explosions, pratfalls, and robots; heroes, aliens, and blondes — it must be summertime at the movies. Beyond the flash, though, it’s striking to note just how many movies will require us to actually think this summer — aren’t we supposed to save thinking for the fall? Maybe it’s the election,…
Here’s your hat, Indy, but, really, what’s your hurry? Because 19 years after the Last Crusade that clearly wasn’t, and 15 years after the old man joined Young Indiana Jones on the small screen to recount his glory days blowing horns with Sidney Bechet, it’s almost unfathomable that this hoary…
It’s hard being a human, but being a common person in China is even more difficult,” says one tearful shopkeeper along the soon-to-be-submerged banks of the Yangtze River in Sino-Canadian documentary filmmaker Yung Chang’s lucid, beautifully observed portrait of the same incipient flood zone that served as the backdrop for…
Call them the comeback kids: In its early days, the 2008 Cannes Film Festival has served as a staging ground for a number of unlikely returns, beginning with that of Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who’s been absent from movie screens (except as an occasional actor) for nearly as long as…
CANNES, France — The competition for the Palme d’Or is ongoing as I write, but the story of the 61st Cannes Film Festival is Steven Soderbergh’s two-part, four-and-a-half-hour Che—an epic non-biopic that might well have been approved by Roberto Rossellini, envied by Francis Coppola, and even appreciated by its subject…
No adult has ever been able to codify what separates a good movie from a classic. In kid terms, though — those favored by Son of Rambow, a chipper tribute to the cinema as both supplier and repository of dreams — a good movie merely sends you bounding home from…
“Things never happen the same way twice.” Thus boometh Aslan the lion (Liam Neeson), alias the Son of God, briefly popping his computer-generated shaggy head into The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian to pep-talk a bunch of discouraged Brits into fighting the good fight again. As in life, so in…
Every now and then, a movie comes along that looks so spectacularly, cosmically bad that you fear for the sanity of its producers. What Happens in Vegas …? Nothing surprising. It’s a clunker of a title, and the film’s premise — career woman Cameron Diaz and laid-back, laid-off Ashton Kutcher…
Converting a fondly remembered cartoon series — one of the first Japanese animes syndicated on American television — into a prospective franchise, the Matrix masters, Larry and Andy Wachowski, have taken another step toward the total cyborganization of the cinema. Even more than most summer-season f/x fests, Speed Racer is…
David Mamet’s Redbelt is a tricky bar brawl — call it the Roundhouse of Games. The writer-director has scarcely abandoned his sense of the movies as an innately duplicitous medium, one best suited to stories that play out as conspiratorial chess matches. But, with his 10th feature — an entertaining…
First-time writer-director Helen Hunt stars as April Epner, a schoolteacher desperate to have a child before she turns 40 (Hunt herself turns 45 this year, but never mind that). Adapted by Hunt and two other writers from Elinor Lipman’s novel, it’s a not surprisingly confident debut; Hunt directs like she…
Chalk it up to personal preference, but I’ve always been fonder of those comic-book heroes who emerge by intent rather than happenstance. I mean the ones, like Batman’s Bruce Wayne, whose transformation from average joe into masked crusader is an act of will instead of the unintended result of a…
In Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey plays a conveniently rich and willfully single serial “fornicator” slowly but surely domesticated by his unspoken love for longtime BFF Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), who’s on her way to Scotland to marry Mr. Right Now since Mr. Right is too chickenshit to say boo before…
Lonely is the life of the mogul. The long hours and hectic schedule make dating a headache, but who needs romance when you have the services of an anonymous sex club at your disposal? Like Rideshare with benefits, the “list” around which Deception centers is a phone directory of stock-market…
Jay McCarroll knows he needed Project Runway more than Project Runway needed him; after all, humility is just one facet of his considerable charm. The other part is his outsize personality, equal parts wit and whimsy, and although Project Runway has done just fine since McCarroll won the Heidi Klum-hosted…
