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…
The extraordinary Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, more comfortably known as “that abortion movie that won this year’s Palme d’Or,” sheds its secrets slowly, a high-end realist drama quickening skillfully into a thriller. Though the frighteningly late-term abortion at its center hints at larger sins in…
Semi-Pro’s much better than Blades of Glory, which wasn’t nearly as good as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which was a little better than Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which was almost as funny as Old School, which was better than everything else Will Ferrell had done…
“When you sleep with the king, it ceases to be a private matter.” And so it comes to pass that young Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson) must stand before her father, Sir Thomas (Mark Rylance), and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), and report the nitty-gritty details of having…
Justice League: The New Frontier(Warner Bros.)Based on Darwyn Cooke’s comic-book miniseries — a masterpiece starring all of DC Comics’ major-leaguers at the dawn of their immortality during the Cold War — this animated adaptation plays stronger, faster, and further than any direct-to-DVD in recent memory. It’s a grown-up superheroes story,…
George Carlson. Put together by curator Ann Daley, who has shaped and defined the Western collection at the Denver Art Museum, George Carlson: Heart of the West deals with the career of an accomplished neo-traditional artist who looks to the century-old Impressionist style for inspiration. The Carlson exhibit includes nearly…
Do you have the crazy?” a wild-eyed zombie fighter demands of his duct-taped captive. The Signal has the crazy all right, bless its cold and sick little heart. A roundelay/tag-team triptych by three directors, filmed in the hitherto-untapped zombie haven of Atlanta, this uneven but impressive shot-on-digital shocker earns a…
Like most wannabe heroes of the eager-to-please teen comedy, poor little rich boy Charlie Bartlett is charming and quirky. Too charming by half and not nearly quirky enough, as played by an artfully rumpled and wide-eyed Anton Yelchin. Blazered, briefcased and blitzed, Charlie comes to us newly expelled from his…
The pleasures of Be Kind Rewind do not extend far beyond the promise of its premise: Jack Black, magnetized and manic (yawn), erases every single videotape in the rental store where he hangs out and has to reshoot the movies with pal Mos Def. Theirs becomes a ramshackle filmography of…
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…
Margot at the Wedding(Paramount)Margot (Nicole Kidman, or someone who looks just like her) is a fiction writer whose tales are based, uncomfortably and unkindly, on the real-life family for whom she seems to care very little. Hence sister Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) late discovery that Margot’s a “monster” — late…
Clyfford Still Unveiled. A master and pioneer of mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionism, painter Clyfford Still was something of an eccentric in the artist-as-egomaniac stripe. His antisocial behavior led to a situation where 94 percent of his artworks remained together after he died — a staggeringly complete chronicle of his oeuvre that…
The year is 1950; the location is Harmony, a small town in Alabama. Piano player Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover) is the proprieter of the Honeydripper lounge, but he’s on the brink of losing the joint, and everything that can go wrong for Purvis is going wrong for Purvis. He owes…
Sandwiched somewhere between the American Spirit commercials and the Clinton campaigning that make up Definitely, Maybe is a surprisingly rewarding romantic comedy — one worth the effort, because some effort’s actually been put into it. Imagine old-school Woody Allen starring that shit-eating smirker from Van Wilder, Ryan Reynolds, who’s always…
Fleet-footed corpses are, from a physiological point of view, complete bullshit. “If you run that fast, your ankles will snap off,” says Jason Creed (Josh Close) to fellow film student Ridley (Philip Riccio), the gauze-wrapped lead of his no-budget Mummy opus The Death of Death. Pausing to regroup, cast and…
Freudians disheartened by the Bearded One’s fall from psychotherapeutic grace may be cheered to learn that ol’ Sigmund lives and prospers at the movies, at least in child-friendly cinema. The Spiderwick Chronicles, an extravagantly oedipal fantasy adventure based on the popular children’s novels by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, comes…
No Reservations(Warner Bros.) From its cheap, mid-’90s-looking package to its woefully scant extras (one pre-chewed Food Network behind-the-scenes, blech) to its wide-screen/full-screen option, this feels like something dropped right into the discount bins; it probably debuts at half off this week. And this soufflé of a romantic comedy deserves better:…
Face East. Gallery co-directors Jim Robischon and Jennifer Doran usually go the extra mile to put together a great show, but in this case they went an extra few thousand, traveling all the way to China to pick out pieces for Face East, their salute to contemporary Chinese art. In…
At the crosswalk the other day, I noticed something peeking out from the usual pasting of fliers on the light pole in front of me. It looked like an address label. In a nondescript font was printed: “OUT OF IRAQ” — a plea unlikely to persuade any policymakers who happened…
No celebrity hairdresser should ever be allowed near Colin Farrell’s eyebrows with a tweezer. Black, fluffy and gloriously unilateral, they still aren’t the prettiest things about In Bruges; that honor falls to the Belgian city itself, known for its scenic medieval turrets, bourgeois tedium and unfavorable comparisons with Amsterdam. Bruges…
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…
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford(Warner Bros.)Beautifully shot, masterfully acted, and 19 hours too long, Assassination is an uneven mix of the artful and the arty that never had a shot at bringing in the audience that Brad Pitt’s chiseled melon should’ve delivered. Pitt is great,…
