Writer-director Alex Garland continues his assault on human specialness (and humanity in general), this time going so far as to loop in the self among the parts of us subject to genetic malleability. He does a neat job of it, noting that we die naturally because of a fault in …
One long string of banalities about the mortification of being a studious quiet high-school girl with a flighty brassy pushy mom. (Natalie Portman, Susan Sarandon, respectively.) The slums-of-Beverly-Hills milieu was better captured in The Slums of Beverly Hills, as was, for that matter, the feeling of adolescent mortification. The periodic …
A supposed "showcase" for a large ensemble of New Generation actors, not all of them as new as they need to be for their ten-year high-school reunion (in the dead of the Massachusetts winter!). Scott Rosenberg's glib, stilted, writerly dialogue -- to do with the ongoing growing pains at the …
Ballet hokum becomes a head trip of pop-goth stylization as director Darren Aronofsky falls off his raw, real form of The Wrestler. Natalie Portman worked hard as the traumatized ballerina but spins around in a blur of bad dancing, one-note acting, and demented plot. Helping to creep it up are …
Jim Sheridan’s Hollywood do-over of Susanne Bier’s Danish original is a wartime soap opera served up as kitchen-sink realism, photographed by Frederick Elmes with a clear and cold albeit clichéd eye for Middle American mundanity. The Good Brother (Tobey Maguire) is off to war in Afghanistan, currently the Good War, …
Reekingly urbane Mike Nichols chamber piece, prone to be seen as a long-distance companion to his Carnal Knowledge in its dirty talk and its romantic disillusion. The quartet of players -- two American females, a stripper (but of course) and a portrait photographer, and two British males, an obituarist and …
The hardships and heartache of the American Civil War, cushioned in the plushness of the production: the crane-happy camera, the spendthrift special effects, the "painterly" washes of color and "dynamic" compositions, the visual poetry and bombast, the chiselled and sanded faces of the A-list romantic leads, Nicole Kidman (with her …
Natalie Portman narrates this documentary about what shouldn't enter one's mouth.
Woody Allen's excavation of the musical genre -- not the backstage variety, which is still extant and needs no excavation, but the average-people variety. He does not take naturally to the conventions of the genre. He takes academically to them. Philosophically to them. Archaeologically to them. And the butterscotch candy …
Small-screen actor Zach Braff, who also wrote and directed, as the most impassive sadsack this side of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate: impassive amid the surrounding panic of a plane-crash dream scene; impassive in the sanatorium ambience of his bedroom, lying motionless on his back and listening to the news …
The film is an opportunity to see familiar faces in unfamiliar roles, most notably Natalie Portman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The story centers around TJ (played with vulnerable conviction by Devin Brochu), a diminutive high schooler struggling with the death of his mother. His grief management takes a drastic turn with …
Were it not for the giant blood stain on the lower-half of her fabled pink dress – a moment director Pablo Larraín takes his sweet time revealing in a startling pullback – and constant juxtaposition next to her husband’s casket, Jackie Kennedy could have just as easily been mistaken for …
Natalie Portman stars in Gavin O’Connor’s western about a woman who must seek former lover Joel Edgerton’s help in holding off a gang of baddies led by Ewan McGregor.
TV director Noah Hawley's first feature stars Natalie Portman as an astronaut who finds life on earth constricting.
Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple buckles under pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past. Directed by Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine) and starring Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, and Charles Melton.