Like first sex, writer/director Maggie Carey’s debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise, but not quite adept at getting everyone off. It’s an impossibly huge deal yet also a modest achievement, something we have to go through but will no doubt be…
Fruitvale Station Makes a Man of a Martyr
All that Canadian farmer Craig Morrison (James Cromwell), age 87, wants to do is build a little house, on his own land, without having to ask anyone’s permission. In this pitch-perfect, deeply affecting film, writer-director Michael McGowan tells the true story of what happened when Craig’s determination to build an…
Your end-times fantasy most likely says a lot about you. Adherents to the Left Behind eschatology must at some level relish the notion of everyone who doesn’t believe what they believe facing holy wrath, and what eco-conscious citizen of the Earth hasn’t thought, uncharitably, of how satisfying it will be…
In actual life, bureaucratic systems are the only workable state-citizen interface we’ve developed that can handle the sheer multitude of smelly, cranky humanity. In comedies, filmmakers often render the infinite and otherworldly in the mundane, human terms of bureaucracy, with all the waiting rooms, Muzak, and impossible regulatory complexities that…
More Than Honey: The Incredible Lightness of Bees
Michael Winterbottom brings a light, breezy touch to The Look of Love, a biopic of London’s notorious nudie-club mogul Paul Raymond (Steve Coogan), whose Raymond Revue Bar and Men Only smut mag helped make him, by 2008, Britain’s richest man. Unfortunately, Winterbottom only lightly enlivens what turns out to be…
In actual life, bureaucratic systems are the only workable state-citizen interface we’ve developed that can handle the sheer bulk of smelly, cranky humanity. In comedies, filmmakers often render the infinite and otherworldly in the mundane, human terms of bureaucracy, with all the waiting rooms, Muzak, and impossible regulatory complexities that…
As summer comic-book blockbusters go, The Wolverine is not as elephantine as it could have been. It’s more, well, wolverine–bony, loping, a little shaggy–and, blessedly, director James Mangold doesn’t get bogged down in mythology. You don’t need to diagram the convoluted relationships between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men characters…
“I kept thinking she was the ugly duckling who was going to turn into a swan,” a fortyish loudmouth complained as the crowd trudged out of a preview screening of The To Do List. “But she was an ugly duckling all the way through!” He was talking to two women…
With episode four of Dexter’s final season, “Scar Tissue,” we return back to the infamous shipping container. Proving yet again that this eighth season will continue to parallel its first season, Harry Morgan and the shipping container anchor the plot throughout this episode. Last week, we left off with Dexter…
During a meeting at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Miami, a chatty Javier Cámara cannot resist an opportunity to channel his plane steward character Joserra. “You need water,” he tells the trio of journalists gathered for the interview. “Let me serve you water. I play a stewardess in the film, after…
The Way, Way Back is a crowd-pleasing summer treat, predictable in its sweetness but satisfying all the same. It’s like the multinationally branded ice-cream sandwich you get on any pier in the Western Hemisphere — market-tested to appeal to as many people as possible (but you don’t mind gobbling up)…
With his anxious parable I’m So Excited!, Pedro Almodóvar imagines a plane malfunction not as a pretext for thrills, as in most films, but for a metaphorical farce: The jet is Spain, and what we should fear for is not only the passengers’ lives but also the country’s. Defective landing…
In this very talky, action-free thriller — a remake of a 1995 South Korean film — Amy (Heather Graham), a wannabe master chef, uses food to insinuate herself into the life of her neighbor, Saffron (Carrie-Anne Moss), a deeply depressed former child star. Amy is living in a fantasy world…
Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-into-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement, or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…
Incest, eyeball-gouging, interior decorating: If Only God Forgives is any indication, writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn is a man of many interests. He’s also put Kristin Scott Thomas in a blond wig and an assortment of cougar-mom outfits, which is either a plus or a minus, depending on how you look…
We have the Twilight franchise to thank for the fact that almost no sane adult wants to see another vampire movie, ever. Not that all the Twilight movies were bad. The first, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, hit a teen-dream sweet spot, the point where gothic lit meets the iPod. And…
A sommelier can incite intimidation, scorn, or trust, depending on who’s drinking and who’s pouring. Rarely, at least in America, do we take full advantage of proximity to those nerds with corkscrews. Somm follows four young men training hard to be Master Sommeliers, of which there are only 200 worldwide…
The characters inhabiting the three very French worlds of Catherine Corsini’s emotional thriller bear two common burdens: the weighty residual guilt of hit-and-run homicides, and strange compulsions to ruin their own lives for no apparent reason. When designated tragic hero Al (Raphaël Personnaz) accidentally runs over a man the night…
Big dreams come in small, slimy packages in Turbo, the story of a garden snail (Ryan Reynolds) who realizes his need for speed after a freak accident involving a hot rod’s nitrous oxide tank turns him hyperfast. Chastised for his racecar dreams by curmudgeonly brother Chet (Paul Giamatti), Turbo nabs…
There’s a gorgeous moment in Yoruba Richen’s documentary The New Black, currently playing the film festival circuit, in which two young black lesbian activists canvass an inner-city black neighborhood to drum up support for the gay marriage initiative that was on the ballot in Maryland’s 2012 statewide election. The women…
