The big news out of the Berlin Film Festival last week was that Shia LaBeouf, here to promote Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume 1, behaved like an ass on the red carpet at the movie’s premiere last night. He showed up in a proper tuxedo, but also with a paper…
Though it’s difficult to pinpoint the typical Berlin Film Festival film, I’ve attended the festival enough times to attest that most pictures in the competition lean toward the somber end of the scale: You’re more likely to see a drama about immigrants in tough circumstances or children left to fend…
It’s a little sad that Colin Farrell has outgrown roles that require him to wear raggedy sweaters and say things like “For fook’s sake!” It had to happen, though. Farrell has always made a terrific bad boy, but he clearly knows he couldn’t be a scamp forever, and he seems…
Now that people are living so much longer, our self-invention can seemingly go on forever. The heroine of Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s exuberant semi-comedy Gloria is right in the middle of the fifty-something version of that in-betweenness. We join her story already in progress, but get the idea pretty quickly:…
Art may not be more important than human lives. But on the list of things that mean something to human lives, across centuries, it ranks pretty high. That’s what’s so compelling about the story of the Monuments Men, a group of people from thirteen nations who volunteered to protect cultural…
A favorite pastime of critics and serious film-goers, perhaps the most idiotic and fruitless one, is to complain about how bad the movies have gotten. The complaint is meaningless, because no matter how “bad” the movies get, there are always actors. There’s no such thing as a golden age of…
Russians still make the best movie villains. Since 9/11, Hollywood has been queasy about giving us fictional baddies from Arab countries — the line between cheap stereotypes and real-life religious extremism is too blurry, too delicate. South American drug lords have had their day, and Albanians in bad sweaters just…
January! Just the time to snuggle up with a 3-D sword-and-pectoral extravaganza. And although some of its more imaginative plot details would make Edith Hamilton blanch, Renny Harlin’s Legend of Hercules fulfills every silly, flimsy promise that it makes in the first place: There are lots of battles (albeit rather…
Rosemary’s Baby notwithstanding, it’s usually only suburban white people who fall prey to movie ghosts and demons — they’re always the ones opening doors to rooms that shouldn’t be entered, stepping witlessly into pentagrams painted on the floor in goat’s blood, and wondering aloud, “You think this is some sort…
Without big truth-telling scenes, grand, great-lady, Meryl Streep-type actors would be out of work. Hell, Meryl Streep would be out of work. But for now, at least, August: Osage County, John Wells’s film adaptation of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway hit, keeps her out of the bread line. Streep plays…
Over the past few years, our view of modern China — at least as culled from news reports — has been that of a country whose economy has grown so fast that the center cannot hold. Put another way: How can the inhabitants of one country possibly buy so many…
When Peter Guralnick released Last Train to Memphis, the first half of his superb two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, some people must have wondered, “Who needs two books to tell the story of Elvis?” They may as well have grumbled, “Two whole books about America?” Some lives, some careers, push…
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is the kind of movie directors make when they wield money, power, and a not inconsiderable degree of arrogance. Sprawling and extravagant, it revels in all manner of excess, including sexual debauchery, hearty abuse of liquor and quaaludes, even dwarf-tossing. Its antihero, the…
Here’s where I write about how hard it is to draw up a ten-best list at the end of the year. Except it isn’t: I think of drawing up a list as an honor and a necessity, a way of putting twelve months of movie-going into some sort of perspective…
Folk music is supposed to be the music of the people. Yet at the heart of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis, set in New York in the winter of 1961, is a folksinger with no feeling for people. The Llewyn Davis of the title, played by Oscar Isaac,…
The audience that shows up for a comedy is the most tyrannical of all. Their very presence is the equivalent of a schoolyard bully’s challenge: “Go ahead — make me laugh.” Which is why there’s danger in following up a hit comedy with a sequel, even nine years after the…
The best movies about con artists work a bit of flimflammery themselves. They’re not necessarily dishonest; they just can’t resist making the truth shinier than it is in real life. There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell’s extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what…
The life of Russell Baze, a steelworker in a Pennsylvania town just outside of Pittsburgh, may be drab and dreary, but he’s a good, hardworking man with a loving girlfriend. His younger brother, Rodney, has it tougher: A war vet suffering from PTSD, he hasn’t been able to readjust to…
Unlike the Park Chan-wook picture it’s based on, Spike Lee’s Oldboy is drab and humorless, devoid of the stylistic curlicues that can get you through even a bad Spike Lee film. Like its hero, a clueless lug who’s imprisoned for twenty years by an invisible captor for a transgression he…
One of the tragedies of the Internet age is that sometimes movies get attention for all the wrong reasons. When Abdellatif Kechiche (Secret of the Grain) debuted Blue Is the Warmest Color in Cannes in May, the festival jury was so taken with the film and its two lead performances…
It says something that two of the biggest sensations in young-adult literature over the past ten years have featured heroines who keep more than one guy on the line at a time. No longer do the genre’s bright young women sit around waiting for one Mr. Right to notice them…
Richard Curtis has so much to tell us about life. Seize the day! Show people you love them before it’s too late! Don’t let the right one get away! His movies — those he writes, directs or both — are so packed with info-feeling that they become restless jumbles of…
