If ever there were a perfect example of pure, fresh, classical simplicity unnecessarily trodden under with complications, it’s Snow White and the Huntsman. Had it trusted the native charm of its cast and the sensory seduction of its often-astonishing images to humbly, naively retell its story, this Snow White might…

Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel deals in binding family ties and the sterility of the comfortable classes. The New Yorker’s second feature, shot in 16mm black and white, the film is an offhand, picturesque road-trip movie with a mock-epic Northeastern itinerary. It’s also a cage-match brother-and-sister act, revolving around…

Can any one of the millions of Americans who saw Men in Black 2 in 2002 describe its plot today? A single scene? I saw both MIB movies upon their release and have as little memory of the experience as if I’d been mind-wiped with one of those “neuralyzing” flash…

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so utterly shameless it achieves a certain grandeur. Peter Berg’s Battleship, which I swear to God is described in its Wikipedia entry as an “American science fiction action naval war film,” is one such movie. Over the past few years,…

A good portion of Tim Burton’s output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the “Burton treatment” to susceptible texts: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — and now, Dark Shadows. A supernaturally themed soap, Dark Shadows…

Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott) is a polite Jewish boy from fictional Orangetown, Massachusetts, whose one God-given talent is having a skull made of granite and, on command, a rock-’em-sock-’em left-right combination. Doug is a bouncer, but his middle-class parents (Eugene Levy and Ellen David), in denial that their son…

The foundations of Silent House are laid atop La Casa Muda, a nil-budget 2010 Uruguayan horror film that enjoyed an afterlife in international film festivals. It is not surprising that La Casa Muda was hastily snapped up for an English-language remake, for the concept is the sort of low-overhead, trend-conscious…

The Turin Horse not excepted, Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, a comedy, is the most startlingly apocalyptic film of the year. As in their Adult Swim Awesome Show, the abiding aesthetic is free-associative channel-surfing, owing something to the public-access mash-ups of TV Carnage. (The attrition of this is significantly…

There’s no one way to live our lives,” hopes the displaced, adrift couple at the center of Wanderlust. Shopping between the prefab identity options available to them — squeezed, stressed urban professionalism; suburban McMansion soul death; rural counterculture opting out — George and Linda (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) are…

Hostilities in This Means War are declared as two workmates compete for the affection of the same woman. The contested objective is Lauren (Reese Witherspoon), a product tester who decides to apply comparative shopping techniques to dating. Her would-be beaus, FDR (Chris Pine) and Tuck (Tom Hardy), are best friends…

Ti West, the 34-year-old writer-director of The Innkeepers, has spent the past several years steadily toiling his way through the ranks of horror filmmaking. His little-seen apprenticeship cheapies (The Roost, Trigger Man) led to a disowned, freelance gross-out job (Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever) and then finally a name-above-the-title breakthrough…

There’s a point in Haywire when the film’s protagonist, ex-Marine Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), gone rogue from her job as hired muscle for a private government subcontractor, takes a fall while scaling down a drainpipe and hits the ground with a crunch that knocks the wind out of you. It’s…

Director Stephen Daldry has never met a Big Theme he didn’t like: After 2002’s The Hours, a lugubrious women’s-problem picture touching on AIDS and assisted suicide, he went to Auschwitz with 2008’s The Reader. Daldry’s logical next stop is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which, based on the sophomore novel…

Takeshi Kitano’s latest finds the actor-director returning to the familiar terrain of the yakuza film after recent farces (Achilles and the Tortoise, Glory to the Filmmaker!) dealing with artistic endeavor. Stark and brutal, Outrage is a litany of startlingly violent set pieces filmed in Kitano’s decorous, aestheticized style, gunshots blooming…

Although supplying boy’s adventure thrills on the side, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are remarkable for how they make the process of empirical brainwork, and the resulting discoveries, breathlessly exciting. Each Holmes tale simultaneously unlocks a mystery while deepening the enigma of its hero in a miraculously sustained piece…

Puncture is proudly “Based on a True Story.” As is so often the case, this means an indifference to “true” human relationships in favor of crusading self-righteousness. In this instance, the cause is life-saving no-stick syringes, which, despite saving lives, are not beloved by Big Pharm. The upstart personal-injury firm…

Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, is the close-second candidate to be attributed authorship of the 37 plays of William Shakespeare — who, due to the troublesome existence of evidence, remains the general favorite. De Vere, played as a figure of regal isolation by Rhys Ifans, is the protagonist…

Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is a two-bit trainer traveling the state-fair circuit in a not-too-distant future. His line is robot fighting, a sport that has absorbed the audience for boxing, MMA and, apparently, demolition derby. After a tough match leaves Charlie ‘bot-less, he gets news that his ex-girlfriend, with whom…

You know those Affliction shirts, covered in skulls, gothic lettering and tribal patterns, all cacophonous symbols of bad-ass machismo? That’s what the mixed martial arts tie-in movie Warrior is: an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink fire sale of male-weepie tropes, awesome in its thoroughness. The collective dream of authentic blue-collar American grubbiness lives on…

The Guard is a shaggy-man character study, its subject a fifty-something policeman in West Ireland, Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson). No by-the-book cop, Boyle spends his days off romping with hookers and has no qualms about gulping MDMA from the pockets of a freshly dead teenager; he also displays a…

José (Fernando Luján) has been divorced from Nora for twenty years. They were married at least as long. Now he keeps an apartment across from hers; she keeps binoculars. And when, just before Passover, she succeeds after decades of suicide attempts, José is convinced she planned for him to discover…

Alleged to be compiled of found college-project footage from a group of missing students, Trollhunter begins as an investigative report by aspiring Norwegian Michael Moores, trailing RV-driving loner Hans (Otto Jespersen). Suspected of bear poaching, Hans is revealed instead to be the field agent in a government conspiracy to cover…