Late in Rendition, in case you’ve been blind and deaf enough not to have cottoned to the drift, a tense Washington exchange on the legitimacy of bundling dark-skinned Americans off to secret prisons abroad takes place. On one side is a driven young senatorial aide (Peter Sarsgaard), on the other…
Had Israeli director Eytan Fox’s new film, about a passionate affair between two men on opposite sides of the Israeli-Arab conflict, been released in the early 1970s (when I was the same age as its twenty-something hipsters and living in Tel Aviv), the movie would have attracted a smattering of…
After Hair, Hairspray, and the mass marketing of tie-dye, can the ’60s be shrunk to fit any further? Yes, indeed, here comes Julie Taymor to run the revolutions of sex, class and race through the PG-13 sieve. Not that one turns to musicals for deep thought, but John Waters at…
So here’s this Arab actor talking to me in Hebrew about his role as a Saudi soldier in Peter Bergs The Kingdom which ought to be enough cultural confusion to throw anyone, let alone someone just cruising onto the radar of an industry not known for casting Middle Eastern actors…
Oh, wipe that starchy Masterpiece Theatre moue off your face. Pop Jane Austen is fun, especially when it’s almost completely made up. According to Becoming Jane, a new addition to the plentiful Austen spinoff canon, our lady of graceful letters was hot stuff at cricket and kissing and had a…
The raciest thing I ever saw my mother do was read a brown-paper-covered Penguin edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover on the London Underground. She didn’t fool all the other passengers carrying similarly disguised copies, and though I was only twelve years old in that fall of 1960…
I wanted to hate I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, truly I did. Two straight guys pretending to be gay (insert fiscal excuse here); been there, done that (insert all known variants on The Odd Couple here). Rampant homophobia hiding behind liberal pleas for tolerance — blech. And it’s…
Parked uneasily between sensitive indie and studio chick flick, Lajos Koltai’s Evening makes star-studded hash of Susan Minot’s beautifully written, if emotionally constricted, novel about a terminally ill woman trying to wrest meaning out of the shards of her memories. Floating in and out of delirium in her Cambridge, Massachusetts,…
Awash in daily news of mass savagery, collective memory grows short. We feel for the women of Afghanistan, but who these days remembers the war widows and rape victims of the 1992-1995 civil war that sent Yugoslavia to hell and brought it back a divided country? Now comes the young…
Coming out of Shrek the Third, I asked the two smart preteen girls I had in tow what they had liked about the picture. Projectile vomiting and multiple farts, they said promptly, best Shrek ever. Ordinarily I’m not big on puking and flatulence, but in this instance I sympathized; there’s…
In the superbly tacit chamber piece Away From Her, intolerable pressure is brought to bear on the 44-year marriage between a college professor and his homemaker spouse after she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Grant Andersson (played by veteran Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent) and his wife, Fiona (an artfully wrinkled…
Three noisy women and a worn-out premise rattle around trying to make contact in Georgia Rule, an incoherent dramedy of rampant parental insufficiency from director Garry Marshall. Marshall’s broad comedy has always made him a soft target for critics, but along with his duds (Beaches, Runaway Bride and Raising Helen…
Lest we imagine that the publishing industry went to hell only after James Frey and J.T. Leroy clambered on board, here comes Lasse Hallström to remind us of a literary dustup emblematic of a much earlier nadir for American mendacity. The Hoax parses the rise and fall of faker Clifford…
Packed with female book club members, a screening of Mira Nair’s The Namesake left no doubt about the film’s target audience. If anyone’s going to flock to this warm and likable tale, it’s going to be women, yet it seems a pity to confine the movie behind the bars of…
I am sorry to say that Peter did not feel very well that evening. His mother put him to bed and gave him a dose of chamomile tea. ‘One tablespoon to be taken at bedtime.’ But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper. — Beatrix…
Morally irreproachable and flat as a pancake, Phil Anschutz’s latest movie endeavor, Amazing Grace, is set among bickering House of Commoners in late-eighteenth-century London, but it belongs squarely in the blooming subgenre of Whites Saving Dark-Skinned Victims of Empire. Or at least it would be were Apted able to bring…
Little Children, a second excursion into middle-class unease by Todd Field after his intelligent but overrated In the Bedroom, opens with a slow pan around a living room whose shelves are crowded with cheap china figurines of… little children. Twisted into insidious grins, their blood-red lips ooze a comic horror…
Given what an awful stiff Somerset Maugham can be, it’s remarkable how many movies have been made of his uptight tales of civil servants sweating it out in British colonies (48 for the big screen alone). John Curran’s fresh take on Maugham’s The Painted Veil, from a crisp script by…
Light on visceral thrills and heavy on the quotidian rhythms of life on the force, Xavier Beauvois’s police procedural owes more to Prime Suspect and Hill Street Blues than it does to any film genre. And Le Petit Lieutenant is all the better for it, if you can withstand the…
The actress Viola Davis has carved, handsome features and a tenacious stare that brooks no inattention. Though Davis’s implacable integrity has, for the most part, saved her from the hooker-in-the-hood roles that confine so many black actresses, she has yet to climb out of the prison of dignified maids and…
Of all the hundreds of pedophile priests to be flushed out of the woodwork in recent Catholic Church history, Father Oliver O’Grady has to be one of the most harmless-looking — and the most sinister. Wispy, unremarkable and accommodating, with an ingratiating half-smile playing permanently about his thin lips, Father…
Front-loaded with family discord, terminal cancer, prodigal jailbait, a cute kiddie looking for love, and other accessories of the ready-to-wear soap opera, Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is as heartfelt, sincere and soggy with nostalgia as some of his other periodic homages to the virtues of peasant…
