We know — you’re excited about The Dark Knight Rises. And The Avengers. And The Hunger Games. So are we. We’re also excited about a lot of other movies whose marketing campaigns have not inundated us with white noise (yet). Allow us to suggest a few more films to put…
Martin Scorsese’s first foray into big-budget family filmmaking — as well as his inaugural effort in 3-D — Hugo is a personal statement disguised as a sellout. Based on Brian Selznick’s 2007 illustrated kids’ book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo centers on its title character, played by Asa Butterfield,…
In hindsight, the 1984 hit Footloose — starring Kevin Bacon and directed by Herbert Ross — along with its contemporary, Flashdance, can be seen as the link between the old Hollywood model of a let’s-put-on-a-show musical, based on original songs brought to life in elaborate choreographed numbers, and the later…
A procedural on the political manipulation of medium and message, George Clooney’s fourth directorial effort is bookended with scenes of media-op prepping. In the first, Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), a thirty-year-old campaign advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Mike Morris (Clooney), fills in for his boss at the sound check for…
Currently the fifth-to-last film on Steven Soderbergh’s ever-expanding pre-retirement slate, Contagion opens on day two of a global viral epidemic. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Beth Emhoff, an employee of an ominously unspecific multinational corporation who returns from a business trip in Hong Kong to her wintry Midwestern home feeling like crap…
The sleeper hit of the 2010 film-festival and indie-awards circuit, Mike Ott’s moody micro-budget Littlerock patiently observes the California road trip of college-aged Japanese siblings Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka, also the film’s co-writer) and Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto). En route to Manzanar (the filmmakers leave viewers to draw on their own knowledge,…
In Jesse Peretz’s Our Idiot Brother, Paul Rudd plays Ned, a kind of upstate New York version of Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski — a man out of time, blinkered enough to be living the hippie dream. In the film’s first scene, Ned is “entrapped” into selling pot at a farmers’…
Directed by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig from a screenplay by David Nicholls and based on his novel, One Day stars Anne Hathaway as Emma, a too-serious would-be writer in coke-bottle glasses and combat boots. She’s nursing a crush on Dexter (Jim Sturgess), her too-good-looking rich-boy college classmate. She’s earnest, tenacious…
More than just the Hollywood It Girl of the moment, Emma Stone is a real actress, and in The Help, she gets an ostentatious, Oscar-baiting Big Scene in which to prove it. Stone is, to borrow a phrase from Bret Easton Ellis’s Twitter account, thoroughly post-empire — she doesn’t need…
A uniquely Freudian entry in the body-switching comedy canon, The Change-Up stars Jason Bateman as standard issue anal-retentive lawyer/family man Dave, and Ryan Reynolds as Dave’s classically anal-expulsive stoner/playboy childhood friend Mitch. When sober, Dave begrudgingly tolerates Mitch’s wild-animal routine. One night, when both are drunk, Dave admits he’s secretly…
There may be nothing as Old Hollywood as the narrative about a pretty girl summoning up a dose of pluck to triumph over adversity. And yet Brit Marling — the lithe, stunning co-writer and star of 2011 Sundance Film Festival hits Another Earth and Sound of My Voice, who gives…
Nina (Li Bingbing) is a Shanghai career girl who drops plans to move to New York when she learns that her estranged bestie, Sophie (Gianna Jun), is in a coma. Soon Nina discovers the manuscript of a novel that Sophie had been writing, which turns their long-term friendship (cemented as…
In the first scene of Crazy, Stupid, Love., Emily (Julianne Moore) tells Cal (Steve Carell), her high-school sweetheart and husband of twenty-plus years, that she wants a divorce. She goes on to mention that she had an affair with a co-worker named Dave Lindhagen (Kevin Bacon), at which point Cal…
Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics in 1941, Captain America was among the first American comic books intended as an explicit work of patriotic, political propaganda: The cover of the first edition, available months before Pearl Harbor, famously featured the titular costumed hero punching out Adolf…
There’s a scene in Horrible Bosses in which Jennifer Aniston, playing a dentist who habitually sexually harasses her weakling male hygienist (Charlie Day), repeatedly says the word “pussy.” Her character is trying to intimidate his, while the filmmakers attempt to shock the audience with the spectacle of this lady rom-com…
From Tad Friend’s New Yorker profile of Anna Faris to the glass-ceiling-shattering pressure assigned to last month’s Bridesmaids, a case could be made that 2011 will be remembered as the year the film industry (finally!) acknowledged its institutional misogyny, took steps to reverse it, and even learned that letting chicks…
Including glimpses of Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin, the rings of Saturn and a roadside Texas BBQ, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life bears forth a variety of forms — and invites as many reactions. You may feel amazed or muddled, softly spoken to or simply abandoned while watching…
L’amour Fou opens with unbroken footage from designer Yves Saint-Laurent’s 2002 speech announcing his retirement from fashion after forty-plus years at the helm of the massively important label bearing his name. It’s a stunning performance, flowing from naked confessional (“I have known the false friends of tranquilizers…and emerged dazzled but…
A nebbishy screenwriter who longs to publish a novel, Gil (Owen Wilson) is tentatively working on a book set in a nostalgia shop — much to the open frustration of Inez (Rachel McAdams), his all-too-modern, rich-girl fiancée, who has a tendency to talk about him in catty, judgy tones as…
Bridesmaids is a high-profile test case. Directed by Paul Feig (a sitcom journeyman most lovingly known as the creator of Freaks and Geeks), it’s the first female-fronted comedy produced by Hollywood kingpin Judd Apatow, who has weathered criticism in the past for his brand’s dude-centric point of view. It’s also…
Written and directed by Quentin Dupieux, Rubber follows the exploits of a tire (listed in the credits as “Robert”) that figures out how to control its own motion and then rolls through the desert on a killing spree, blowing shit up with its mind. Rubber’s methods of address make it…
The opening title card of François Ozon’s 1977-set Potiche seems to take design inspiration from the exploitation films of that period — a sneaky-smart way of nodding to one of this pastel-colored political farce’s key topics, if not its stylistic mode. As Suzanne, Catherine Deneuve plays the title role, which…
