Writing about A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, the 2006 debut film by director Dito Montiel, I likened it to the sort of crude but fascinating object one might find in an exhibition of naif art. Adapted by Montiel — a former hardcore punk musician — from his autobiographical novel…
A glue-huffing variant on the gimmick-noir D.O.A., 2006’s Crank was a riotous demonstration of the actionvore’s dilemma: The harsher the swill you consume — “swill” in this case meaning an AYCE strip-bar lunch buffet of mindless splatter, bone-jarring crashes, and beyond-gratuitous T&A — the harder it is to get high…
The Soloist opens with newspapers thudding onto lawns, a quaint sight that makes the movie practically a period piece, even though the events that inspired it took place within the past four years. An old-fashioned tale for a new-fangled world, the movie turns on a series of columns begun in…
It’s almost foolish to review Hannah Montana: The Movie as anything other than the latest cog in a cultural phenomenon/mass-marketing juggernaut. The film itself certainly doesn’t aspire to anything more. A brightly colored yet cheap-looking affair (director Peter Chelsom doesn’t even try to push beyond the material’s TV roots), the…
Dead Bodies and Buried Ledes in State of Play
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have transformed some of the saggiest, most clichéd genres with smarts, non-screechy politics, superb acting, and visual beauty. Though, on paper, its premise could have easily elicited groans, Half Nelson — their 2006 feature debut (that Fleck directed and the two co-wrote) about a white…
Observe and Report writer-director Jody Hill makes mean-spirited tragedies that studios market as inane comedies because otherwise no one would pay a cent to see them. That’s more or less what happened to Hill’s The Foot Fist Way in 2008, two years after its Sundance twirl first caught the attention…
South Florida native Brian Hecker’s uncomfortably strained directorial debut — a semiautobiographical comedy about a high school senior who can’t find a prom date — foolishly believes that Windsor fonts, swing-era songs, and Jews are enough to invoke Woody Allen’s wit. It’s a quirky indie, you see, as nerdy class…
Set a mere two decades ago, Greg Mottola’s Adventureland seems as if it could be taking place on a distant planet, less for the leg warmers and knee socks clinging to lower extremities than for the legions of pre-Internet Luddites who gather, like the apes at the start of 2001,…
Renny Harlin has an unjustly terrible reputation, but with the right material (Deep Blue Sea, Mindhunters), he’s very good at delivering stylish, knowingly ludicrous entertainment — that is, if he goes for hard R material, like the lurid deaths that fuel his best films. 12 Rounds is a wan PG-13…
Just as we thought the “bromantic comedy” had overstayed its welcome, the genre reaches its high point with writer-director John Hamburg’s best film yet. The subtext is finally the text — it’s right there in the title. It delivers an absolutely complete, fully realized, delightfully novel redo of the hoariest…
At the end of 2008, DreamWorks Animation bossman Jeffrey Katzenberg embarked on a cross-country tour, toting 20 minutes’ worth of Monsters vs. Aliens. The reason for his trek? To convince critics that 3-D movies are no longer the snake-oil salesman’s hustle, but the future of filmmaking — if not the…
No longer weighted down by the perukes she had to wear in The Duchess, Keira Knightley returns to the simpler chignons of Atonement in another World War II-set prestige piece with a starchy literary pedigree — this one scripted by her mum, Sharman MacDonald. Knightley sings and affects a Welsh…
No one does raging unlovability quite like John Malkovich, who’s a total gas when he drops the bombast that often bogs down his more serious roles. Not that Buck Howard, the once-great mentalist now playing to half-empty theaters in Hicksville, lacks for pathos — or glory. His lounge act is…
Whether it’s the amnesiac super spy of the Bourne franchise or the weary law-firm fixer of Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy specializes in characters who wear so many masks that, memory loss or no, they scarcely know who they are anymore. Guided by instinct, his soldiers of fortune patrol a ruthless…
When the unfinished version of “The Pale King,” David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel about a group of IRS agents, is published next year, boredom will have officially become the new aesthetic ecstasy. It may be already. One of the standout films of this year’s Miami International Film Festival, Enrique Rivero’s…
That was the most offensive display of sexualized violence I have ever seen,” one wilting fellow in need of a camphor hankie was overheard saying in the elevator. Such blanching is the reaction Last House on the Left is trolling for, but I doubt it will be typical. Permissibility has…
Two Sundays ago, Academy Awards host Hugh Jackman triumphantly declared, “I am Wolverine!” in a powerful, firework-aided falsetto that ended his introductory routine and simultaneously confirmed just how far Hollywood’s self-esteem has fallen. Ironically enough, Jackman’s jab at himself was the funniest moment of the night, but it begs the…
Haven’t we been here before? The inbred mutant offspring of Crash and Babel, writer-director Wayne Kramer’s Crossing Over treats the subject of illegal immigrants in Los Angeles with the same vulgarity Kramer brought to his 2006 children-in-peril thriller Running Scared, this time (barely) concealed under a paper-thin plaster of Oscar-worthy…
When we last saw Tyler Perry’s signature character — the bosomy, blunt-smoking, Glock-yielding Georgia granny — she and her brother, Joe (also Perry), were being pulled over by the po-po in a cameo in last March’s Meet the Browns (this is Perry’s third film in 11 months). Wearing a fat…
The Confessions of a Shopaholic we need right now would be a handheld doc featuring former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain sobbing into the camera and begging the American public to forgive him for purchasing a $35,000 commode. With its curious release date — the film is meant to be…
If Alice in Wonderland were retold by the Mad Hatter, it might look something like Henry Selick’s 3-D, stop-motion Coraline, in which the bored, blue-haired 11-year-old of the title (voiced by Dakota Fanning) travels through the looking glass and ends up in a world that strangely resembles her own —…
