Family dysfunction in the white-trash neighborhood. Charlize Theron, as her Oscar for Monster goes to show, loves to play beneath herself; and in tall white boots, skin-tight pants, and raccoon eyeliner, her love shines bright. For most of the way, however, she steps aside for the quieter Nick Stahl and …
Feverish daydream, partly amorous, partly avaricious, around an unschooled Bombay teenager who, hoping to reconnect with his childhood sweetheart, climbs toward the top prize on the Indian Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? It breaks down into three time zones, shuffled together in a jumble: the game show itself, the …
Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Thomas Haden Church, and Ellen Page in an indie misfit comedy in an academic setting, which enables the viewer to feel more virtuous when not laughing than when not laughing at a low-brow Hollywood comedy: “My fun’s just a little more cerebral than your fun.” …
The interweave of ordinary lives in a wintry Northeastern small town has a number of attractions in it, starting with the clear bright wide-screen image, letting in a lot of décor and townscape, albeit much of it self-satirically quaint and cornball. Kate Beckinsale shows off, not for the first time, …
Filmmaker Majid Majidi, a card-carrying animist, proves again his attentiveness to, aliveness to, the surrounding world. The opening shots of domestic ostriches from the neck up, the pursuit of an escaped ostrich by ten men on foot, a solitary pursuer patrolling the hills in a homemade costume as an ostrich …
A sweet nothing, acutely cloying, about the bonding of dissimilar English schoolboys, devil and angel, plus a slightly less adhesive French exchange student with two-toned hair and trend-setting wardrobe, all collaborating together on a video sequel to First Blood for entry in a Young Filmmakers Competition. Cartoon slapstick and tender …
A former R&B duo, not speaking to one another in over a quarter-century, make an uneasy peace to drive cross-country for a reunion concert at the Apollo. Sort of a soul-music Sunshine Boys, without Neil Simon’s craftsmanship. With, instead, nothing but crassmanship. Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac, even as …
Colorful, to say the least. Color-overflowing, to say a little more. Color-engulfed. The live-action version of the late-Sixties made-in-Japan TV cartoon is of course, in this day and age, only partly live-action: real people like Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, and Matthew Fox inserted into a world …
An inherited Gothic monstrosity in the countryside, newly occupied by a fatherless family from the Big Apple, houses a secret chamber and a sealed book, never meant to be read, Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You. The build-up (scrabbly sounds in the walls, a plastered-over dumbwaiter, …
Indestructible masked superhero versus (ho hum) indestructible archvillain, in Central City, U.S.A. Comic-book artist Frank Miller, honorary co-director of the screen treatment of his Sin City comic, now flies solo in the treatment of the Will Eisner comic: same drained color, same minor exceptions (reds, yellows, blue eyes), same self-conscious …
Documentarist Errol Morris takes a crack at the Abu Ghraib scandal, not long after Alex Gibney took a crack at it (among other things) in Taxi to the Dark Side. Morris’s talking heads are unusually well-lit, and they speak revealingly from the inside, sometimes in ways they might not intend. …
Or in the order the words appear on screen and in the ads, Star the Clone Wars Wars. It fills in events on the timeline between parts two and three of the second cycle in George Lucas’s space saga. If, from this remove, that’s still of concern to anyone. Under …
Mainstream comedy, at the broadest point in the stream, about a pair of developmentally arrested forty-year-olds (Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly), still living at home with their respective single mom and single dad, then living together after the parents meet and marry, living first at loggerheads and later in boisterous …
Family get-together in annual commemoration of a premature death. Hirokazu Kore-eda (After Life, Nobody Knows) dons the mantle of Yasujiro Ozu, and finds it a little large. The slow accumulation of domestic and conversational minutiae seeks a balance of the sublime and the monotonous, tilting ultimately toward the latter. Yoshio …
Ellen Burstyn, as the headstrong protagonist of the Margaret Laurence novel, reviewing her life at its end, hits many authentic notes but finds no one and nothing to harmonize with. And the dominating flashbacks of the first half, substituting Christine Horne as her younger self (well matched physically), shut her …