If the great movie musicals of yesteryear put a song in your heart, Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs leaves you with a funny taste in your mouth. How else to describe Honoré’s orally fixated post-postmodern operetta, whose libretto includes lyrics like “Keep your saliva as an antidote/Let it trickle like sweet…

When Time recently featured George Clooney on its cover accompanied by the headline “The Last Movie Star” — note not even a question mark at the end — you didn’t have to read the article to know where it was coming from. After all, stars of the post-pubescent variety are…

Considering that the war in Iraq has proven to be Washington’s shot-by-shot remake of Vietnam, it’s only natural that Hollywood has followed suit, giving us a series of Iraq-themed films that can be set neatly alongside their Vietnam-era counterparts. Just as the initial wave of angry anti-Vietnam documentaries (In the…

To the uninitiated viewer, Austrian director Michael Haneke might best be described as modern cinema’s master of the unkind rewind. In the opening scene of his second theatrical feature, Benny’s Video (1992), we see crude camcorder footage of a farm pig being shot with a cattle gun during a family’s…

This past fall, The Band’s Visit made headlines after being disqualified as Israel’s foreign-language submission to the 2008 Academy Awards — an ironic fate, indeed, for a movie that takes language as its very subject. The official ruling of the Oscar referees was that too much of the film’s dialogue…

Remember the 1985 movie version of the Parker Brothers whodunit board game Clue, with its pre-DVD-era gimmick of multiple endings? Well, Vantage Point is like that, only instead of multiple endings, it gives us multiple beginnings. Oh, and Vantage Point, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t supposed to be…

When a friend recently told me that she’d been confused by the poster for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson fortune-hunting romp Fool’s Gold adorning her local multiplex — that she’d thought for sure this movie had already come and gone — I understood her bewilderment. Even as a professional film critic…

Morgan Spurlock makes us look bad, plus (separate!) films on baseball and steroids shine. Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Sugar, which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival (and was inexplicably shut out at the closing-night awards ceremony), gets as much right about baseball as…

It took nine years for Godzilla to rise up out of the ashes of Hiroshima and wreak his destruction on the good people of Tokyo in 1954. Here in America, it’s taken just over six years for the idea of an escapist disaster movie set on the streets of New…

I do think the writing is pessimistic — all that stuff about life being a tragic experience,” says Angela Stark (played by newcomer Hayley Atwell) early in Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream. An actress talking about the play she’s appearing in at a small London theater, Stark could just as well…

The story of how The Kite Runner’s Homayoun Ershadi got into movies is a bit like those fanciful tales of stars and starlets discovered by casting agents while sitting at the soda counter in Schwab’s Pharmacy. Only, in Ershadi’s case, he was driving his Range Rover through the streets of…

The first thing you notice when you walk on to the set are the 300 extras in late-1920s period costume, seated at cafeteria tables in a holding area, gazing up at you in their wool suits (for the men) and cloche hats (for the women) as if all of this…

It’s that time of year again. Our six critics (Scott Foundas, J. Hoberman, Nathan Lee, Jim Ridley, Ella Taylor and Robert Wilonsky) don’t always — or often — agree, but we’ve combined their top ten lists, allowing for ties, to pretend like they do! So without further ado, the ten…

Here’s the thing: Tim Burton pulled it off. Nearing the end of an uncommonly strong year for American movies, he’s taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative from well over two hours to well under, cast confessed non-singers in the principal roles, and somehow…

There are two momentous performances in the Darwinian horror fable I Am Legend. One is by the movie’s star, Will Smith — but more about him in a minute. The other is by the movie’s visual effects — not the ones that bring to life a nocturnal army of shrieking,…

Something about that movie, though, well I just can’t get it out of my head/But I can’t remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play. — Bob Dylan, “Brownsville Girl” Literally speaking, Bob Dylan isn’t “there” in Todd Haynes’s staggering mix-tape biopic I’m Not…

Hold still.” It’s what the hunters say to the hunted in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. The first time we hear it, it’s the out-of-work Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) whispering optimistically to the antelope he spies through his rifle sight while perched on the crest…

I gave up after about 100 pages of John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel Reservation Road, a typically overwritten and contrived slice of mass-market literary pablum that hopscotches between the points-of-view of three people — the grieving mom, the grieving dad and the perpetrator — involved in the hit-and-run death of…

To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away…

In the new Neil Jordan movie, Jodie Foster plays New York talk radio DJ Erica Bain, who survives a vicious Central Park mugging and becomes an urban crusader devoted to cleaning up the city — with a Glock instead of a broom. Yes, The Brave One is that movie: the…

By late summer, when director James Wan’s Death Sentence is playing side-by-side with Neil Jordan’s The Brave One at many of our nation’s multiplexes, movie-goers will be forgiven for thinking that they’ve traveled through a time warp and landed in the late 1970s, when first-class cinemas and seedy grindhouses alike…

Shortly after graduating from film school, I took a part-time job as the assistant to a successful movie and television director who told me I’d be handling a mix of personal and professional responsibilities. Not long after, I was put to work maintaining the good humor of the tenants at…