Set in the Norwegian boonies, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s first fiction feature (based on Olaug Nilssen’s 2005 novel) introduces its fifteen-year-old protagonist, Alma (Helene Bergsholm), with her hand down her pants, furiously coming as she listens to a phone-sex operator. Yet the opening scene’s promising boldness is soon undermined by cutaway…
Suitable entertainment for a Knights of Columbus fundraiser, Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope finds the Most Holy Father, wracked with self-doubt about his new position, on a walkabout in Rome. Back at the Vatican, the cuddly cardinals who await his return square off in a round-robin volleyball tournament. The…
There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway line, at least adds a bit of charged political reality to puncture Nicholas Stoller’s limp, hermetic comedy of deferred nuptials. Tom (Jason Segel, who co-scripted with Stoller), a talented…
I spotted a bottle of something called Marley’s Mellow Mood, “a new line of 100 percent natural relaxation beverages,” in my neighborhood deli just a few hours after seeing Marley, Kevin Macdonald’s documentary on the reggae and Rasta emissary — a reminder of just how crassly the Jamaican legend, who…
If no one watches, then they don’t have a game,” a teenager says in this faithful if cautious adaptation of the first volume of Suzanne Collins’s astronomically successful dystopic YA trilogy. A withering indictment of omnipresent screens, endless spectacle and debased celebrity culture, The Hunger Games was inspired, the author…
The television show 21 Jump Street, about cops who go undercover as high-schoolers, debuted on Fox in 1987 — one year after the network premiered — and ran until 1991, launching the career of Johnny Depp (who cameos here along with former castmate Holly Robinson Peete). As a sign of…
In the opening scene of Friends With Kids, a conspicuously placed copy of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion on the bedside table of Jason (Adam Scott) marks him as a non-believer. His doubt also extends to conjugal matters, for he is unconvinced that married parents could ever be happy. Sharing…
Produced by his youngest daughter, Gina, this profile of Harry Belafonte, foregrounding the 84-year-old actor and singer’s political activism, is a moving if occasionally wearying hagiography. Not that the subject is unworthy of anything but veneration: Unbowed by the racism that dogged him during the first several decades of his…
Produced by his youngest daughter, Gina, this profile of Harry Belafonte, foregrounding the 84-year-old actor and singer’s political activism, is a moving if occasionally wearying hagiography. Not that the subject is unworthy of anything but veneration: Unbowed by the racism that dogged him during the first several decades of his…
Fulfilling a mission that has consumed her for almost two decades, Glenn Close — as producer, co-writer and lead — brings to the screen the titular character of Albert Nobbs, a woman who passes as a man in 1890s Ireland, a role for which she won an Obie in 1982…
A holy hot mess of the sacred and the inane, Joyful Noise, about a small-town Southern gospel choir, lifts from Usher’s “Yeah!” to give us this inspirational lyric: “Now God and I are the best of homies.” The film is Jesus for Gleeks — no surprise, since writer-director Todd Graff’s…
The first ten minutes of Pariah — Dee Rees’s funny, moving, nuanced and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are inseparable — sharply reveal the conflicts that seventeen-year-old Alike (Adepero Oduye) faces. Riding the bus back to her Fort Greene, Brooklyn, home after a…
An undeniably charming homage to Hollywood in the late 1920s, The Artist might also be the first silent film many of its viewers have ever seen. French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius eases neophytes’ discomfort by creating the cinematic equivalent of an amuse-bouche. Although many of the technical aspects of the silent…
A sensitive portrait of childhood just before pubescence, Tomboy, the second film by writer-director Céline Sciamma, astutely explores the freedom of being untethered to the rule-bound world of gender codes. About twenty minutes elapse before we learn the real name and biological sex of Laure (a revelatory Zoé Héran), a…
That this film was originally titled Goethe! should give you a sense of how much silly sturm und drang boosterism awaits. A biopic more fiction than fact, Young Goethe in Love opens in 1772, when the 23-year-old aspiring poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Alexander Fehling) flunks his bar…
Desperately trying to appeal to not just the Gen X’ers who grew up with Kermit, but also the tykes who’ve never even heard of Jim Henson, The Muppets has none of the easy confidence of the original TV show or movie. The reboot is largely the labor of love of…
Standing outside his small-town Ohio home, his wife and child busy preparing breakfast inside, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) looks up at the ominous, slate-gray sky in the first scene of Take Shelter. The clouds open, raining down oily, piss-colored droplets. It’s end-of-days weather, a phenomenon that only Curtis seems to…
Sure to be drowned out by the drum circles at Occupy Wall Street, writer-director J.C. Chandor’s lifeless Margin Call depicts roughly 36 hours at an unnamed Manhattan investment firm at the dawn of the 2008 financial freakout. Chandor’s debut feature audaciously asks us to empathize with obscenely overpaid risk analysts…
“Want it…and watch out,” ruthless corporate veep Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas) instructs younger associate Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier) in Love Crime, a silly tale of boardroom humiliation. The final film from Alain Corneau, who died last year and is best known for 1991’s All the Mornings of the World, Love Crime…
What I don’t know: why these movies keep getting made. I Don’t Know How She Does It is based on Allison Pearson’s 2002 diaristic, comic bestseller and directed by Douglas McGrath. But its real auteur is screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, scripter of wan workplace romantic comedies such as the limp…
At one point in Higher Ground, Vera Farmiga’s decades-spanning directorial debut, the actress, playing Corinne, a woman still soaked with lake water after her baptism into an evangelical sect, resembles no less a touchstone than Ronee Blakley in Robert Altman’s Nashville: slightly high hair; starchy, sexless, long tunic dress; swaying…
Inspired by a 2008 New York Times Magazine article by Alex Kotlowitz, Steve James’s commanding documentary The Interrupters, about “violence interrupters” in Chicago, who intervene in conflicts before they escalate into gunshots, unfolds as deeply reported journalism. Much like Hoop Dreams (1994), James’s in-depth examination of the athletic aspirations of…
