It’s hard out there for a video-game villain: always being attacked, never given the benefit of the doubt, and forever pigeonholed into a role no one wants to see you escape. Such is the fate of Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly), the bad guy in an old-school arcade game called…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
The trailer for Cloud Atlas, the gargantuan new movie of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel that took two Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer to adapt, looks less like a preview than a whole slate of coming attractions, so many and varied are the times and places that it touches down. The…
The winner of the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at Sundance, Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In, an occasionally muddled disquisition on the colossal failure of the War on Drugs, rehashes much that will be familiar to even the most casual reader of newspapers: that this “war” is waged…
It’s a Sunday afternoon in New York, and Tom Tykwer and the filmmakers formerly known as the Wachowski Brothers are talking about Zardoz, that odd and ambitious 1974 science-fiction drama most infamous for featuring a gun-vomiting godhead and Sean Connery in a mankini. As a film that confronts viewers from…
At around the four-minute mark of my first viewing of the Cloud Atlas trailer, as the M83 track swelled to its bursting point and a hoverbike darted through future-Korea, I remember e-mailing and GChatting at least a dozen friends with a link to the preview and my take: “Holy Shit.”…
Raconteuse, epigrammatist, mythomaniac and peerless fashion editor Diana Vreeland (1903-89) might have loved words as much as she loved Balenciaga. As Harold Koda of the Met’s Costume Institute, for which Vreeland served as a special consultant from 1973 until her death, memorably says in this often charming non-fiction bauble, “I…
Ask local filmmaker Paul Berry what BARK, showing at the Mercury Cafe this Wednesday, is “about,” and you end up with a shake-and-bake collection of themes and pop-culture references that include George Lucas, the Baghavad Gita, political satire, George W. Bush, buffalo on the moon and an implied post-modern anti-war…
As the first cousin of Project Runway celebrity Mondo Guerra, I can attest to the fact that Halloween in our extended family was always a treat. Since Halloween is one of Mondo’s favorite holidays, he’d decorate his parents’ house with cobwebs, tombstones and stuffed straw men, and on the big…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
Although the title of directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s dual portrait of two players in the underage-modeling world might suggest an industry smackdown in the familiar mode of high-documentary dudgeon, Girl Model proves unsettling in any but the usual ways. Redmon and Sabin don’t need statistics and cautionary talking…
English filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s atypical, impressionistic approach to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is her adaptation’s main hook. As with Fish Tank and Red Road, Arnold’s last two feature-length dramas, the new Wuthering Heights is very much about the act of looking. The novel’s tempestuous plot is thus unmercifully filtered through…
When it comes to cost-cutting, downsizing and philosophical and practical compromise, how low is it possible to go before there’s nothing left to cut — and nowhere to go but up? Detropia, the evocative new documentary from filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp), is a portrait of a…
British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s remarkable new adaptation of Wuthering Heights comes packing some redoubtable weapons, including the most atmospheric ultra-realism the story has ever seen, an awesome sense of the Yorkshire landscape, and no small payload of brooding poeticism. But undoubtedly, its coup de grâce has everything to do with…
“This film was born out of the rage of not being able to make other projects,” Leos Carax says of Holy Motors, an anomaly in the French director’s oeuvre, as its production was relatively stress-free. Speaking at a hotel bar in New York, Carax says, “It was imagined very quickly,…
This week’s Paranormal Activity 4 continues the story of an extended American family whose members own a lot of surveillance cameras, camcorders, smartphones, baby monitors, webcams, Talkboys and other consumer electronic devices with which they record the haunting of their nice suburban tract homes by a terrifying demonic entity. The…
In Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths, a prune-faced, simian-mouthed sexagenarian sits by the road in an old suit and brown-patterned tie, and cradles a white bunny in his arms. This is precisely what we’ve come to expect of a Tom Waits entrance. Waits has long been one of Hollywood’s favorite sight…
“Positive characterizations are complex characterizations,” says writer-director Ava DuVernay, tucking into a serving of roasted potatoes. “That’s all we need to know. They shouldn’t be saccharine. They shouldn’t feel like medicine. You know, often films that are deemed positive, nobody wants to see them.” It’s a recent Sunday afternoon, and…
In 1987, ACT UP — the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power — was born in New York City, an activist-centered response to the growing HIV and AIDS epidemic that was largely going ignored by the American government. Through How To Survive A Plague, a documentary opening Friday, October 12 at…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
Made and narrated by a son in an attempt to reconcile his own perception of his father with that of the public at large, Gotham Chopra’s Decoding Deepak is as much an exercise in self-help as it is a demystification of its title character. Deepak Chopra, whose protégées include Lady…
Perhaps you’ve lost faith in movies about amusingly digressive criminals. Maybe you believe it’s no longer possible to be pleasurably jolted by inventive swearing, from-no-place head shots, and post-everything structural flourishes. Certainly you have no reason to expect blood-splattered poetry or throat-clearing laughter from yet another movie in which Los…
