The Yiddish shtetl shtick that opens Joel and Ethan Coen’s new movie — a Jewish peasant stumbles on an old Hasid who may or may not be a dybbuk — is pretty clumsy, but at least it tips its hat to the great existential comedy that A Serious Man might…
The ushers at a packed screening of Michael Moore’s latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, came proudly decked out in T-shirts bearing slogans like “Make Love, Not Capitalism” and “Capitalism, We Have a Problem.” The shirts and the movie are brought to you by those filthy Reds: Overture Films, which…
The stately Japanese movie Departures comes to theaters trailing some justified ill will for having trounced the critical favorite, Israel’s Waltz With Bashir, for Best Foreign Film at last year’s Academy Awards. It’s not hard to fathom what Academy voters saw in Departures, an earnest appeal for renewed respect toward…
At the tail end of The Da Vinci Code, having traipsed around scenic Paris and London for over two hours to find out whether the Holy Grail was just an old cup or the womanly seed of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Tom Hanks’s Robert Langdon, ace symbologist, sloped off back…
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 last four years. An old-fashioned tale for a newfangled world, the movie turns on a series of columns begun in…
If Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a lovelorn bachelor in James Gray’s Two Lovers, was twelve years old, the movie might make a touching, if not noticeably fresh, romantic drama for tweens. Not that adults don’t nurse unhealthy crushes and regress madly under the pressure of hopeless infatuation, which may be…
The smirky, overbearing, and subliminally hostile romantic primer He’s Just Not That Into You — which sold a regrettable two million copies when it was published in 2004 — seizes on some partial truths about the gender wars and blows them up into evolutionary gospel, as follows: Since cave-dwelling times,…
Is it a sign of the Apocalypse? Something in the water? Or just the way the wind is blowing? Whatever the case, when our often-contentious quintet of film critics put their heads together about the best movies of 2008, they managed to agree (more or less) on a dozen they…
Like Doubt, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader is low-budget, high-profile and beamed straight at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Category of High Moral Tone. Only in this case, the stakes are way higher and the attitude muted to a fault. Based on a partly autobiographical novel by Bernhard…
Back in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Boston, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn’t get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so I wasn’t altogether surprised…
You don’t have to have been raised on colonial Brit Lit, classic melodramas, Westerns or war movies, or Gone With the Wind to figure out the likely outcome of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia within its first fifteen minutes, but any or all of the above will help. Tightly wound and corseted…
Kristin Scott Thomas has gotten so locked into playing tragic victims or frigid grandes dames that few remember the actress got her big break as a wistfully amused friend in Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, or that she played Plum Berkeley on Absolutely Fabulous. Thomas has mischief in…
With his blazing white coat and pig-pink ears, to say nothing of the zigzag of lightning cut into his flank, the eponymous canine lead of Disney’s lively new animated movie Bolt looks a little bit real and a whole lot not. That’s not a failure of craft: Goofy and sweet…
On a double bill with L.A. Confidential, Chinatown or just about any film made after 1970 about institutional corruption in Los Angeles, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, a period drama based on a 1928 Los Angeles missing-child case, would come off as faintly geezerish noir lite. As LAPD scandals go, the case…
Anne Hathaway makes a compelling bad girl in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. Those who believe that Jonathan Demme went all soft with Philadelphia and never recovered may not be reassured by his latest movie, an ensemble tale of family pathology gussied up with verité camera work, world music and…
The Duchess is the best women’s movie of the summer. Don’t get too excited: Sex and the City, Mamma Mia! and The Women set the bar so dismally low that almost any film with a dame in it who doesn’t channel her identity only through buying, boogying or bedding is…
What do you think this is?” cries a lady who lunches in Diane English’s remake of George Cukor’s The Women. “Some kind of ’30s movie?” Even without the fourteen-year struggle to get the Murphy Brown writer’s pet project past studio doubters, it would be a tall order to remake George…
When I heard that Quentin Tarantino handed the Grand Jury Prize for best feature to Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, telling the audience that the movie “put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame,” my jaw went…
Making notes in 1949 for a review of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell wrote that “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be…while holding untenable opinions.” Which is a nice way of saying that Waugh, a world-class satirist of everyone from the rich down, was also…
I’ve always enjoyed ABBA — not in that post-hoc, so-bad-it’s-good hip way, but innocently, the way I like Phil Spector. To this day, howling along in my car to that echoing, cascading, multiply-overdubbed wall of sound makes me feel like a member of some dippy but joyous cathedral choir. So…
To my ten-year-old daughter, the term “American Girl” means “that store my meanie of a mom — unlike all the other, higher-quality moms — won’t let me go near.” While we’re on the defensive, why should I? She hates dolls, and I — creeped out by row upon row of…
Nothing snaps a child’s head around quite like a dying parent, especially when the parent is a cantankerous old sod like Arthur Morrison (Jim Broadbent), whose nominally adult son Blake (Colin Firth) still clings to childhood grievances. Directed by Anand Tucker and cleanly adapted by David Nicholls from a brutally…
