Halfway through Surfwise, a mesmerizingly ambivalent documentary about an itinerant family of Jewish surfer-dude health nuts, we meet the 84-year-old patriarch, “Doc” Paskowitz, at Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance, showing director Doug Pray a blown-up photo of a Nazi preparing to shoot a Jewish mother and child at close range…
Loath though I am to carp about any director who’s devoted chunks of his career to bringing the non-white world’s suffering to Western attention, Roger Spottiswoode’s The Children of Huang Shi — a drama based on the life of an Englishman who saved an orphanage full of boys from Japanese…
Behold Adam Sandler, in a passable Israeli accent and outsized codpiece, as Zohan the Mossad super-heavy: catching barbecued fish in his butt crack on a Tel Aviv beach, repelling bullets with his nostril, sculpting hand grenades into toy poodles for delighted Palestinian children while making mincemeat of an Arab terrorist…
Oh, please — spoiler alert? Fine, I won’t tell you whether Carrie Bradshaw ties the knot with Mr. Big, even though you’ve already seen that gown winging its way around the web. Given the Sex and the City vibe, some fans might be more interested in whether the frock is…
“Things never happen the same way twice.” Thus boometh Aslan the lion (Liam Neeson), alias the Son of God, popping his computer-generated shaggy head briefly into The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian to pep-talk a bunch of discouraged Brits into fighting the good fight again. As in life, so in…
Jon Avnet’s cheesy new thriller, 88 Minutes, is 105 minutes long, and going in, I feared that 100 of them would be eaten up by Al Pacino chewing the furniture. Alas, it’s worse than that. Pacino plays a Seattle forensic psychiatrist in symbiotic thrall to the serial killer he helped…
Do we need another look back at the rotten heart of the ’50s nuclear family? Ira Sachs thinks we do, and as one who can’t get enough of sweaty melodramas about rotting families, I’m with him in principle. Mind you, Sachs’s noticeably childless new movie is less about families than…
Near the beginning of The Counterfeiters, a fact-based Holocaust drama by Austrian filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky, we meet Jewish money forger and former jailbird Salomon Sorowitsch (brilliantly played by Karl Markovics), packing to flee Berlin in 1936 with a suitcase full of fake money. We know from an opening coda that…
For an obscure tale of a virginal London governess who discovers her true calling running interference for a giddy night-club singer, the 1938 English novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day has enjoyed a pretty lively renaissance. Knocked off in six weeks by Newcastle homemaker Winifred Watson while she washed…
The extraordinary Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, more comfortably known as “that abortion movie that won this year’s Palme d’Or,” sheds its secrets slowly, a high-end realist drama quickening skillfully into a thriller. Though the frighteningly late-term abortion at its center hints at larger sins in…
Like most wannabe heroes of the eager-to-please teen comedy, poor little rich boy Charlie Bartlett is charming and quirky. Too charming by half and not nearly quirky enough, as played by an artfully rumpled and wide-eyed Anton Yelchin. Blazered, briefcased and blitzed, Charlie comes to us newly expelled from his…
Freudians disheartened by the Bearded One’s fall from psychotherapeutic grace may be cheered to learn that ol’ Sigmund lives and prospers at the movies, at least in child-friendly cinema. The Spiderwick Chronicles, an extravagantly oedipal fantasy adventure based on the popular children’s novels by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, comes…
No celebrity hairdresser should ever be allowed near Colin Farrell’s eyebrows with a tweezer. Black, fluffy and gloriously unilateral, they still aren’t the prettiest things about In Bruges; that honor falls to the Belgian city itself, known for its scenic medieval turrets, bourgeois tedium and unfavorable comparisons with Amsterdam. Bruges…
Some years it can be hard to come up with enough stellar lead performances to make an awards minyan. But every year is a good year for supporting roles, and not just because the field has grown so wide since independent film became a force to be reckoned with. Many…
It’s that time of year again. Our six critics (Scott Foundas, J. Hoberman, Nathan Lee, Jim Ridley, Ella Taylor and Robert Wilonsky) don’t always — or often — agree, but we’ve combined their top ten lists, allowing for ties, to pretend like they do! So without further ado, the ten…
Simmering below the squeamish elder-care euphemism “uncharted territory” is a fearful awareness that when it comes to dealing with the growing army of senile parents, we have no idea what the hell we’re doing. Tamara Jenkins plumbs the depths of that terror in her new film, The Savages, and jacks…
Kites fly high over the San Francisco Bay and Kabul (okay, China), but not much else soars in Marc Forster’s flaccid adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s vivid 2002 novel, which covers three decades of Afghanistan’s misery under serial totalitarian rule. Arriving on the heels of Atonement, The Kite Runner tells a…
In Starting Out in the Evening, a new film by Andrew Wagner, a pneumatic graduate student spreads honey over the face of the elderly New York novelist she’s trying to seduce. Later, the two will lie down on his bed with their hands by their sides, and later still, he…
Re-reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement last weekend, my first thought was: I hope to God that Joe Wright — whose broadly grinning Pride & Prejudice made a mess of Jane Austen two years ago — doesn’t screw up this wonderful novel about lust, love, loss and what art can do to…
Midway through the amiable children’s movie Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, there comes a speech that I’ll wager writer-director Zach Helm has been saving for future use ever since he discovered the Bard. As pop philosophy goes, it’s bracing stuff: Paraphrasing King Lear, Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman), a 243-year-old “toy impresario”…
Less a war drama than a set of dueling position papers, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs may be the gabbiest movie ever made about American foreign policy — and it wasn’t even written by Aaron Sorkin. Hot young screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is fresh off his alpha-male script for The…
Before he snagged the lead in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1972 screen version of Anthony Shaffer’s 1970 stage play Sleuth, Laurence Olivier had, with his customary diplomatic finesse, dismissed the source material as “a piece of piss.” Two movie adaptations later, I’m inclined to agree with that assessment. Still, it’s not…
