Like antidepressants, artificial sugars, Botox, and other miracle inventions of the past century, corporate culture became an omnipresent fact of life before anyone could know how it would affect the human body and brain on an extended timeline. One way to look at writer/director Craig Zobel’s second feature, Compliance—a pot-stirrer…
“My son is sick right now, covered in zits. It’s not contagious—I mean, it’s contagious, but don’t worry: Grownups don’t catch it. It’s called mouth-foot-and-butt disease or something.” Julie Delpy materializes on the patio of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont on a wave of nervous energy. Hair pinned up away from her…
The Campaign begins with an on-screen quote attributed to Ross Perot: “War has rules. Mud-wrestling has rules. Politics has no rules.” The Texas billionaire/private-campaign-financing pioneer dropped this truism not during his historic third-party run for the presidency in 1992, but in the midst of his far less successful 1996 campaign…
Vividly bringing to life the question of whether self-denial is a social responsibility that Don DeLillo poses in Cosmopolis, Lauren Greenfield’s new documentary, The Queen of Versailles, tracks the post-crash lifestyle of rich so nouveau it doesn’t realize its appetites strike others as crude. The titular royal is Jackie Siegel,…
Michael Winterbottom is multi-tasking — like that’s a surprise. He’s made a dozen films in the past decade, as varied as the Steve Coogan-as-Steve Coogan joints 24 Hour Party People and The Trip, the controversial Jim Thompson adaptation The Killer Inside Me, and two radically different assessments of the War…
Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve’s third feature, Goodbye First Love, begins in 1999, when protagonist Camille (Lola Créton), a highly emotional high school girl in love, is fifteen, and tracks her through her mid-twenties as she’s establishing a career. We first follow Camille through her all-consuming romance with Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), a…
From bubblegum-bi-curious novelty “I Kissed a Girl” on, Katy Perry has built a career on glorious brain-dead-with-a-wink odes to play-acting in a fantasy space of total acceptance and no consequences, sold to children with literal sugarcoating. Her hits are powerful stuff, coming from an artist who was raised by Pentecostal…
1979. Woody Allen has just had the biggest hit of his career with Manhattan — a love letter to the titular city, a romantic celebration of its timeless urban landscape set in a nostalgic-fantastic present, culminating in the gut-punch realization that what’s past is irretrievably past. Manhattan’s $39 million take…
“Welcome to the recession, boys,” says John Travolta’s DEA-double-agent profiteer in Oliver Stone’s Savages, based on Don Winslow’s novel. Savages is a movie of its moment, though both its good guys and bad guys (if there’s really even a difference) are unquestionably the 1 percent of their industry — that…
When Channing Tatum stood up and revealed his bare ass to the camera a minute or two into Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike — which the actor conceived of and produced based on his own experience as a teenage dancer in an all-male exotic revue — the audience in my screening…
With her high cheekbones, feline brown eyes, and heart-shaped mouth, actress Aubrey Plaza is bombshell-hot. But in an unusual twist for a twentysomething performer at the beginning of her career, Plaza’s natural foxiness is a resource that has gone largely unexploited. Not exactly a character actress — she hasn’t yet…
It’s 1965, the rainy end of summer on the rocky coast of a fictional New England isle. Twelve-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman), a scrawny, bespectacled outcast with an unusual aptitude for cartography, disappears from the Khaki Scout camp, absconding with a couple of bedrolls and an air rifle, leaving behind a…
This entry in the “hot young opposites attract over the course of one long night” genre takes place at Scotland’s muddy summer counterpart to Coachella, T in the Park. Adam (Luke Treadaway), the skinny-jeans’d frontman of a famous Brooklyn electro duo, gets in a squabble with Morello (Natalia Tena), a…
In The Dictator, his third collaboration with director Larry Charles, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the young, dumb dictator of fictional North African nation Wadiya. Under Aladeen’s rule, oil-producing, uranium-enriching Wadiya is a hostile threat to global peace and capitalism. And yet Aladeen himself is so attracted to…
Twenty-something Silver Lake couple Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) talk their way into an unnamed cult that meets to follow the teachings of the enigmatic Maggie (Brit Marling). A glowing blonde dressed in white shrouds with a respirator as an accessory, Maggie claims to have been born in…
At the start of Joss Whedon’s long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick, The Avengers, the Tesseract — a powerful, potentially dangerous glowing cube that fell to the ocean floor after Captain America (Chris Evans) liberated it from the Nazis in his movie last summer — is in the hands of NASA…
In the first scene of Israel’s Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee, Footnote, Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi) — a forty-something Talmudic scholar whose research has earned adulation while his sixty-something father’s has mostly been ignored — accepts an honor with an obliviously glib speech built around a childhood anecdote about his…
Written and directed by Paul Weitz, Being Flynn is an adaptation of Nick Flynn’s 2004 memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which explored the author’s pivotal experience working at the Boston homeless shelter where his down-and-out dad, Jonathan, was a frequent guest. In the movie, Paul Dano and Robert…
The gorgeously scruffy Juliette (director/co-writer Valérie Donzelli) and Roméo (co-writer Jérémie Elkaïm) — yes, the improbability is noted — move from dive-bar love-at-first-sight to proud parents of a newborn boy in the first few minutes of Declaration of War. Then their eighteen-month-old son, Adam, is diagnosed with a brain tumor…
Directed by Oren Moverman (The Messenger) from a script by Moverman and L.A. noir master James Ellroy, Rampart tracks the downward spiral of LAPD cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson). A Vietnam vet whose personal code allows for extreme bad behavior in the name of a hazily defined greater good, Brown…
In Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tilda Swinton lives out an urban bohemian’s worst nightmare. Forced to give up her independence (and downtown loft) when a reckless night with shlubby photographer flame Franklin (John C. Reilly) results in an accidental pregnancy, free-spirit travel writer Eva becomes an…
Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s hit play, Carnage, stars Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet as two sets of Brooklyn parents whose social, economic and philosophical differences are leveled in less than eighty minutes by their pettiness and immaturity. Posh pair Alan and Nancy (Waltz…
