Catherine Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty subverts the classic fairy tale

The second film in her planned trilogy of subverted fairy tales, Catherine Breillat’s latest topples the tyranny of pink and princesses. The Sleeping Beauty, like last year’s Bluebeard, is based on a classic Charles Perrault legend. But Breillat reimagines the slumbering heroine as a gender insurrectionist, freeing her from her…

The Art of Getting By is about as far from true adolescence as you can get

Gavin Wiesen’s first film, as passive and vanilla as its title, continues the numbing trendlet begun in 2008 with Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist: dramatizing the stupefying dullness of privileged white teenagers in New York City. Protagonist George (Freddie Highmore) is an eighteen-year-old Upper West Side Bartleby, preferring not to…

The Robber is as lean as its marathon-running title character

What makes Johann run — and rob? Benjamin Heisenberg’s second feature is as taut, lean and fleet as its title character, played by Andreas Lust and based on the real-life Johann Kastenberger, who was both Austria’s most-wanted bank robber of the 1980s and a champion marathoner. Writing the script with…

Made in Dagenham recalls the ’68 strike for equal pay

Wimmin power retrofitted as holiday heart-stirrer, Made in Dagenham recounts the real-life 1968 strike for equal pay by the 187 distaff machinists at the Ford plant twelve miles outside London. These unwitting soixante-huitards in Mary Quant hot pants and five-story bouffants are led by Rita O’Grady (Sally Hawkins), forced to…

My Dog Tulip reveals the sacred relationship between pet and owner

The antithesis of both Marley & Me cuddliness and Cesar Millan militance, J.R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir about his recalcitrant German shepherd, My Dog Tulip, is one of the finest, most insightful chronicles of inter-species devotion. The writer’s empathy and wit are mostly well served in Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s adaptation…

Talented actresses struggle with weak material in For Colored Girls

It’s a long, long way from the women’s bar outside Berkeley, California, where Ntozake Shange first presented her combustible choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, in December 1974, to Atlanta’s Tyler Perry Studios, where the impresario filmed much of this calamitous adaptation. Though striving…

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest: A story we cannot follow

When we first see Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the final adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, she is being transported to a hospital in Gothenburg, bloodied almost beyond recognition, the result of a bullet put in her brain by Zalachenko, her barbaric…

The hokey pokey: Conviction patronizes the story of Betty Anne Waters

After Fox Searchlight’s Amelia spectacularly flamed out last October, the studio tries again to grab awards-season honors with another biopic starring and executive-produced by Hilary Swank. Gone is the Kansas-patrician enunciation and smartly tailored Depression-era trousers; as Conviction’s Betty Anne Waters, a Massachusetts high school dropout and single mom who…

The Tillman Story relentlessly exposes government arrogance

Amir Bar-Lev’s assiduous, furious documentary on the Army’s craven coverup of the death by friendly fire of former NFLer Pat Tillman in Afghanistan in 2004 — and the exploitation of his corpse for recruitment purposes — is a withering assessment of U.S. military culture. Unlike recent Afghan war doc Restrepo,…

Tilda Swinton’s got to be free in I Am Love

As unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous as its title, Luca Guadagnino’s visually ravishing third feature suggests an epic that Visconti and Sirk might have made after they finished watching Vertigo and reading Madame Bovary while gorging themselves on aphrodisiacs. That it works so well — despite frequently risible dialogue (“Happy is…

Macho meets homo in the laudable but terrible La Mission

Watered-down Jungian analysis meets a GLAAD-approved weepie in Peter Bratt’s second feature, starring brother Benjamin (who also produces) as a swaggering, neck-tattooed macho who will finally realize the damage his rock-hard masculinity has caused during a funeral for a teenage gangbanger, his tears mixing with the rain as he flashes…

Flick Pick

Though the breathtaking vistas of Big Sky Country in Sweetgrass, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s unforgettable sheep-herding documentary, come close to heaven, it’s telling that AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” can be faintly heard over the sound of the electronic contraptions that hired hands yield to shear the docile creatures, one…

Just Wright is a romantic comedy that has gone just wrong

Another movie, not as awful or deluded as this one, might one day find better use for the easygoing vibe between Queen Latifah and Common, the stars of Just Wright, a romantic comedy (for the ladies) with basketball and cameo-ing NBA players in it (for the fellas). That absolutely no…

Up the mountain one last time with Sweetgrass

Though the breathtaking vistas of Big Sky Country in Sweetgrass, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s unforgettable sheep-herding documentary, come close to heaven, it’s telling that AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” can be faintly heard over the sound of the electronic contraptions that hired hands yield to shear the docile creatures, one…

Flick Pick

Everyone in City Island’s Rizzo family has something to hide: Paterfamilias Vince (Andy Garcia) works as a corrections officer but sneaks off for acting lessons; legal-secretary matriarch Joyce (Julianna Margulies) makes out with Tony (Steven Strait), the ex-con Vince has invited to live with them in the Bronx fishing village…

City Island

Everyone in City Island’s Rizzo family has something to hide: Paterfamilias Vince (Andy Garcia) works as a corrections officer but sneaks off for acting lessons; legal-secretary matriarch Joyce (Julianna Margulies) makes out with Tony (Steven Strait), the ex-con Vince has invited to live with them in the Bronx fishing village…

Money, power and culture collide in The Art of the Steal

Matisse called the Barnes Foundation “the only sane place to see art in America.” But the clamor over moving one of the world’s foremost collections of impressionist, post-impressionist and modern art from its home in the bucolic suburb of Merion, Pennsylvania, to center city Philadelphia (4.6 miles away) has been…

44 Inch Chest

A quintet of pathetic pals are sized up in 44 Inch Chest, an often sharp, nasty exposé of masculinity written by Sexy Beast scripters Louis Mellis and David Scinto, reuniting them with that film’s Ray Winstone and Ian McShane. Married for 21 years, Colin (Winstone) is told by wife Liz…

Flick Pick

Another poor, massive, uneducated African-American teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, The Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile, and ever-grateful to…