The transgressive German chase movie Run Lola Run happily tramples all our usual ideas about narrative structure, chronology and character, and for that alone, it’s one of the most fascinating artifacts of the late 1990s. Critic Roger Ebert called it “an exercise in kinetic energy, a film of nonstop motion…
Eugene Yelchin. Over the past several years, Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind has often presented exhibits highlighting the work of Jewish artists who hail from the former Soviet Union. And for these exhibits, Zalkind has turned to Mina Litinsky, director of the Sloane Gallery in LoDo, who’s an acknowledged expert…
The Proposition (First Look) There’s an old saying about Ginger Rogers, who did everything Fred Astaire did — but backwards and in heels. This Australian western seems to be saying something similar about gritty American westerns: You think that’s hard? Try living in the Outback. The Proposition mucks about in…
Directed by Brian De Palma from the novel by neo-noirist James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia is a true-crime policier unfolding in late-’40s Los Angeles somewhere between the neighborhoods of Chinatown and Mulholland Drive. The premise involves one of L.A.’s most notorious unsolved homicides. In early 1947, the naked corpse of…
The Rock — formerly known as “Flex Kavana” and, a bit later, as “Rocky Maivia” — was a practicing actor long before he turned to movies and started taking down $12 million paychecks. The happily deluded throngs who used to watch him lay signature moves like the People’s Elbow or…
Viva Pedro: A Festival of the Best of Pedro Almodovar raises some questions — namely, which Almodovar? The Pedro gloriously festivaled and happily familiar now to middle-class film-goers is an aging, camp-centric teddy bear, a man who has made transgender game-playing and comic vamping safe for the arthouses and has…
Even curriculum-clutchers might rather leave a child behind than let her learn from Half Nelson’s Mr. Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), a Brooklyn junior-high teacher whose off-the-cuff history lessons are based — brace yourself, Bushies — on dialectical theory. History is change, and change, the white teacher tells the kids, most…
Those twenty-somethings, poor dears, can never catch a break in the movies. First this maligned generation is told, in countless gritty indies and perky studio comedies, that they’re rowing through life without oars. Now director Tony Goldwyn’s admirably understated handling of dispiritingly slender material suggests that if you’re pushing thirty,…
An act, more than anything, of due homage and genuflection to David Mamet the ’70s-’80s theatrical provocateur (as opposed to Mamet the ’90s-’00s screenplay doodler), the film version of his 1983 one-act play Edmond is a pleasant actor’s spectacle. You never have to get involved; like so much of Mamet’s…
Granted, this may seem like a jarringly odd comparison, but like the recent dud Phat Girlz, Heading South deals with the hot-button issue of middle-aged women discovering their sexuality anew thanks to the efforts of muscular black men with exotic accents whose standards of female beauty are more flexible than…
Released last year, the Oscar-nominated Sophie Scholl: The Final Days recalls the dark days of Nazi Germany in a fresh and disturbing new way — through the ordeal of an intelligent, idealistic university student (Julia Jentsch) who challenges the regime by distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in a classroom building. In February…
Emilio Lobato and Martha Daniels. The solos that open the season at William Havu Gallery combine the disparate work of two of the area’s best-known and well-regarded artists. On the walls is Emilio Lobato: Desde Siempre (Since Forever), which comprises the artist’s signature abstractions. The title refers to Lobato’s self-exploration…
I Am a Sex Addict (IFC) Caveh Zahedi has made a movie of our times — a strange mix of self-absorption, shamelessness in the pursuit of fame, and sex. Most shocking of all is that it works. Part fiction and documentary, confessional and comedy, the film traces the history of…
If Superman Returns attempted to resurrect the Man of Steel as mythic hero, the season’s other Superman movie wants to disabuse us of any such childish illusions. Glamorously adult, Hollywoodland purports to part the veil on the circumstances by which George Reeves, the actor who embodied the superhero on ’50s…
When we first see Ellie (Diane Gaidry), the younger of two damaged heroines in Jacques Thelemaque’s The Dogwalker, she’s the picture of unhinged desperation. Ill-concealed by big sunglasses, her heavily battered face features a recently split lower lip, one so swollen that she can barely make herself understood when requesting…
A number of pregnant mysteries arise with the new remake of Robin Hardy’s 1973 cult-remembered genre work. Namely, what’s in this kind of malarkey for gender-combat provocateur Neil LaBute, and why was such a high-profile film tossed into theaters last Friday without letting critics see it first? The two simple…
Director Claude Chabrol’s fascination with the pathologies submerged in middle-class life takes a vivid and scary new turn in The Bridesmaid, the second film he’s adapted from a Ruth Rendell novel (following La Cérémonie). This time, an unsuspecting young man (soulful Benoit Magimel) falls into the clutches of a seductive…
Emilio Lobato and Martha Daniels. The solos that open the season at William Havu Gallery combine the disparate work of two of the area’s best-known and well-regarded artists. On the walls is Emilio Lobato: Desde Siempre (Since Forever), which comprises the artist’s signature abstractions. The title refers to Lobato’s self-exploration…
United 93 (Universal) A suggestion to those who’ve put off watching the year’s most wrenching and essential film: Before rolling the feature, first watch the documentary in which the families of those who died on the plane give the filmmakers their blessing, without reservation. If the mother, father, and sister…
If, at this remove, we can imagine Vienna in the late 1890s, we behold a great imperial capital in ferment. Gustav Mahler is not only reinventing the harmonic structure of serious music, but he is getting his head seriously shrunk by Sigmund Freud. Arnold Schoenberg takes painting lessons from the…
By the time Trust the Man opens this weekend, it will have been nearly a year since it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was picked up for distribution by Fox Searchlight. Forget that it’s a year old; this thing tastes a good decade past its expiration…
After declining an invitation to “embed” with a U.S. Army unit in Iraq, film director Deborah Scranton went the military one better by supplying Sony miniDV video cameras to members of Charlie Company, 3rd of the 172nd Infantry (Mountain) Regiment. The result is the most compelling Iraq documentary to date…
