The Big Short Takes on the ’08 Crash — And Crashes

Fueled by impotent, blustery outrage, Adam McKay’s The Big Short, about the grotesque banking and investing practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is about as fun and enlightening as a cranked-up portfolio manager’s rue-filled comedown after an energy-shot bender. Based on Michael Lewis’s 2010 bestselling book of the…

Arielle Holmes Burns Through the Screen in Heaven Knows What

New York has often been the setting for films about heroin addicts, with titles ranging from Shirley Clarke’s cinéma-vérité-tweaking The Connection (1961) to Slava Tsukerman’s new-wave cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) mining the drama of smack freaks tying off, shooting up and nodding out. But Josh and Benny Safdie’s tough,…

Stranger by the Lake is a thriller in more ways than one

For more than two decades, Alain Guiraudie has been unrivaled in depicting desires that upend convention, whether homo or hetero. In the comedy The King of Escape (2009), for instance, a middle-age gay man falls in love with a sixteen-year-old girl; the film ends with an all-male gerontophilic ménage a…

Leviathan‘s cinematic density stimulates the synapses

End of days or the beginning of new ways of seeing? Fittingly, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan, an all-senses-consuming chronicle of a fishing trawler, takes its title from the sea beast described in the Book of Job, lines from which constitute the film’s epigraph: “He makes the depths churn…

Quartet

A decorous gathering of dames and other knighted U.K. doyens, Quartet centers on the residents of Beecham House, a baronial residence for retired musicians. Former conductor Cedric (Michael Gambon), bedecked in a series of fantastic caftans and charged with organizing the annual gala fundraiser, determines that the reunion of the…

Despite its sharp cast, Quartet falls flat

A decorous gathering of dames and other knighted U.K. doyens, Quartet centers on the residents of Beecham House, a baronial residence for retired musicians. Former conductor Cedric (Michael Gambon), bedecked in a series of fantastic caftans and charged with organizing the annual gala fundraiser, determines that the reunion of the…

The Impossible

When the words “true story” appear twice in a film’s opening disclaimer, it’s a guarantee that what follows will include at least one questionable fiction. The Impossible is inspired by the Alvarez Belons, a Spanish family of five who survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed almost 300,000 lives;…

Ten movies to watch for in 2013

Most of the blathering this year about the death of film and film culture has already evaporated from the mind. But one gnomic pronouncement endures: Leos Carax describing cinema as “a beautiful island with a cemetery” following the world premiere of Holy Motors at Cannes. What are the contents of…

It’s hard to take Any Day Now‘s message seriously

Any Day Now is homo history repurposed as courtroom soap opera. Director Travis Fine, greatly embellishing a script written decades ago by George Arthur Bloom — who based it on a real-life, high-camp Brooklyn neighbor (played by Alan Cumming) and the mentally challenged kid he looked after — has virtuous…

Starlet portrays the old, the beautiful and the naked

An empathic, absorbing tale of the old and the beautiful, Starlet tracks an unlikely intergenerational friendship in the San Fernando Valley. Florida transplant Jane (Dree Hemingway) is employed by one of the area’s main engines of commerce, breaking into the XXX industry and cheerfully working adult-movie trade shows. When not…

Diana Vreeland might have loved words as much as she loved fashion

Raconteuse, epigrammatist, mythomaniac and peerless fashion editor Diana Vreeland (1903-89) might have loved words as much as she loved Balenciaga. As Harold Koda of the Met’s Costume Institute, for which Vreeland served as a special consultant from 1973 until her death, memorably says in this often charming non-fiction bauble, “I…

The House I Live In blends explosive statements and soft scenes

The winner of the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at Sundance, Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In, an occasionally muddled disquisition on the colossal failure of the War on Drugs, rehashes much that will be familiar to even the most casual reader of newspapers: that this “war” is waged…

Whitney Houston, actress

In anticipation of the remake of the 1976 girl-group melodrama I (which didn’t screen in time for our deadline)—Whitney Houston’s posthumous film appearance and her return to movies after a fifteen-year absence—we look back at the handful of celluloid performances by the woman once known as “the Voice.” Houston’s pipes…

Oslo, August 31st shows that even a shattered life matters

Joachim Trier has proven to be unparalleled in exposing the foibles and delusions of all the sad young literary men — or of one man in particular. The twenty-something character played by Anders Danielsen Lie in Reprise (2006) finds immediate cult success with his first novel, only to suffer a…

Beasts of the Southern Wild views life through a child’s eyes

A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth and ecological parable, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the southern-Louisiana-set debut feature of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, rests, often cloyingly, on the tiny shoulders of Quvenzhané Wallis. Her character, Hushpuppy, the film’s six-year-old (also Wallis’s age during filming) protagonist and narrator,…

The heroine of Brave socks it to Disney’s pink princesses

With her flame-colored ringlets, Merida, the barely adolescent heroine of Pixar’s thirteenth feature, looks like a wee Rebekah Brooks, maybe a pint-sized Florence Welch. Despite these resemblances, Merida remains an original: Brave, set in the Scottish Highlands in the tenth century, is the animation studio’s first film with a female…