The Barsanti Nexus

2012-02-17T21:19:00.000-05:00

New in Theaters:
Bullhead

Although billed as a crime thriller from Belgium, Michael R. Roskam's Oscar-nominated feature debut is truly more of a character showcase for a deeply physical, lacerating performance by the hood-eyed, glowering Matthias Schoenaerts. Bringing the bruising physicality of a young Robert De Niro to his many wordless scenes, Schoenaerts practically gives Bullhead a reason to exist. Without his dour, amped-up presence, Roskam's underwritten yet overcomplicated film would hardly register...

Bullhead is playing now in limited release. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2012-02-09T09:42:00.000-05:00

New in Theaters:
Safe House

In a better world, things would be different. Ryan Reynolds would realize that comedy is his true calling, no matter how much fun it is to tear around the place in a torn T-shirt waving a semiautomatic. Denzel Washington would remember that he needn’t always be the eye of the hurricane, and maybe some character work would find him. Producers would stop trying to copy the Tony Scott look and just hire the guy. Screenwriters would realize that when writing certain kinds of thrillers about the CIA, the audience is always going to assume there’s one or more moles at the top of the organization, and that revelation of said mole is rarely dramatic...

Safe House opens wide on Friday. You can read my full review at Film Journal International.

2012-02-03T06:49:00.002-05:00

New in Theaters:
Windfall

The law of unintended consequences gets a gentle working-over in Laura Israel's good-natured but dismayingly thin documentary about a windfarm project that divides the small town of Meredith in upstate New York. The controversy will strike many as patently absurd: Who would have a problem with wind power? "I was naïve," says Frank Bachler, the town supervisor, who starts the film off talking about what a good idea it seemed like. Money for the town, clean energy, etc. That was before people started realizing that the windmills would be 40 stories tall and emit a near-constant drone. Then people started going on the Internet, and if the modern age has proven anything, it's that the online research will provide reasons to be terrified of anything...

Windfall is playing now, in a theater or two. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2012-01-28T22:33:00.004-05:00

New in Theaters:
How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?

The ability to conjure art out of massive edifices has something to do with the reverence many hold for our world's top architects. It could also be that most of the buildings the average person walks past or finds themselves inside on a daily basis don't have much to recommend it. Whereas the moment that you come across a structure that cuts through the air in a way that snaps your head back or causes a flutter of awe is so rare that the people who made such a thing happen can seem like modern-day magicians. It's that sense of being in the presence of greatness which both animates and stultifies this glinting bauble of a documentary about architect Norman Foster...

How Much Does... is playing now in extremely limited release. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2012-01-21T21:50:00.000-05:00

New in Theaters:
Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston

A dishwater-dull film about an electric subject, Whitney Sudler-Smith's documentary about the rise and fall of designer Halston has everything it needs for success. There's an iconoclastic, paradigm-shifting artist who's also an aggressive businessman, dozens of fashion icons and hangers-on willing to peddle their stories, and a backdrop of cocaine-dusted and sex-scented Studio 54 decadence. The makings are all there for a glamorous documentary that could combine the wicked appeal of Billy Corben's Pater Gatien biopic Limelight with the more serious fashion-nerd leanings of something like The September Issue. But instead of letting his story naturally unfold like one of Halston's famous shirtwaist dresses, Sudler-Smith gums up the works by inserting his own stiff self front and center in one of the most ill-considered framing devices ever used in a documentary...

Ultrasuede is playing now in limited release. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2012-01-16T21:13:00.000-05:00

The Year in Film:
American Gothic

It was a bad year for America at the movies. Of course, that’s rarely not the case in these days of CGI disaster porn and 3D monstrosity. Still, the threats facing the nation in 2011 movies were exceptional.

Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion sent a plague across the land, with only Matt Damon’s plucky determination and Laurence Fishburne’s cool composure standing between the easily panicked populace and both total decimation and a skeevy Jude Law. The dull-eyed ambition of James Franco doomed humanity in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. An alien armada in Battle: Los Angeles blew up a good part of the Southland, either a natural-resources grab or just for kicks. And Transformers: Dark of the Moon made Chicago feel special, finally noticed by Hollywood long enough for Michael Bay to annihilate it...

You can read my article "American Gothic," and all the gloomy portents it contains, over at PopMatters.

2012-01-10T22:26:00.004-05:00

New on DVD:
Long Story Short

It’s no surprise that Jerry Seinfeld’s name was plastered all over the advertisements for Colin Quinn’s surprise hit one-man show Long Story Short. The signs helpfully reminded everyone that Seinfeld directed this 75-minute history-based standup routine done by one of his good friends. They came up with the idea over breakfast. After all, putting the name of the man behind one of the era’s last widely recognized great sitcoms all over the posters for a show that started out on a little theater on Bleecker Street before graduating to Broadway just made good business sense...

Long Story Short ran off-Broadway, on Broadway, then on HBO, and now on DVD. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

2012-01-07T09:58:00.003-05:00

New in Theaters:
Pina

Joy isn't a feeling that one associates with Wim Wenders all that much. Wonder or ennui, maybe irony, but not joy. But nevertheless that's the first thing that springs to mind with his electric new 3D dance documentary, his first feature to get a real Stateside release since 2005's moody, downbeat Don't Come Knocking. There are other feelings and moods wrapped up here, tragedy and loss, but with all the sunlight (has the man ever shot a brighter film?) and sweeping movement, the joy prevails. This is filmmaking as glorious music...

Pina is playing now in very limited release; it's worth seeking out. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2012-01-04T20:43:00.000-05:00

New in Theaters:
The Iron Lady

There are some honest moments in The Iron Lady. They are practically wordless and give us glimpses into a human routine—that of Margaret Thatcher and her current caretakers—that are extraordinarily moving. Unfortunately, these moments come mostly right at the movie’s beginning and conclusion. In between is a film that does nearly all it can to test the patience of the audience and to see exactly how little light it can shed on one of the most important political figures of the 20th century...

The Iron Lady is playing now in limited release. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

2012-01-03T23:42:00.001-05:00

The Year in Film, Again

The hardworking bunch over at filmcritic.com have all submitted their picks for the 10 best films of 2011.

Herewith the filmcritic.com list:

Drive
We Need to Talk About Kevin
The Descendants
Martha Marcy May Marlene
The Tree of Life
Hugo
The Artist
Warrior
Certified Copy
Super 8

And, just for argument's sake, my own personal list:

The Tree of Life
Into the Abyss
The Trip
Of Gods and Men
Incendies
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Take Shelter
A Separation
The Interrupters
The Guard

2012-01-01T12:25:00.000-05:00

New in Theaters:
A Separation

The metaphor doesn't get any clearer than this. As battling spouses shout at an invisible judge sitting where the camera is, the message is undeniable: they're not just fighting over a relationship, but over a country, one that has both abandoned and entrapped them. The wife doesn't want to stay with her husband, but it's more their circumstances that she's fighting to escape from with their daughter. Not that she, or Ashgar Farhadi's film, comes out and says this. When the unseen judge asks if she thinks their daughter has a future in Iran, she ducks her head and doesn't respond. Writer-director Farhadi's subtle but explosive domestic crime story, dancing nimbly around censorship rules, makes a ringing statement as clear as the injustice witnessed in each of the main characters' eyes.

A Separation is playing now in limited. It's one of the best things you'll see in 2012 or any year, check it out. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-12-23T19:06:00.000-05:00

Holiday Break

Take a snow day, you've earned it.

2011-12-22T17:44:00.002-05:00

New in Theaters:
Pariah

In writer/director Dee Rees's genuinely felt feature debut, her teenage heroine is so hidden from the world that she can't even find herself. The film opens in a smoky, neon-streaked nightclub where a stripper undulates on a stage to the shouts and flung dollar bills of the women watching. Although Alike (Adepero Oduye) is ostensibly there to express herself in a way that she can't at school or in front of her church-going mother, she seems no more comfortable there than she does bottled up at the family dinner table. Rees's point isn't hard to cipher -- Alike's being closeted is about much more than her sexuality -- but she parses it with intelligent, feeling complexity in a film that could have covered itself in cliché...

Pariah opens this week in limited release. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-12-17T14:40:00.003-05:00

New in Theaters:
Carnage

What does a parent do when their child whacks another child in the mouth with a stick? Teeth are lost, scarring ensues, and the machinery of modern American over-parenting rolls into action. Two sets of parents meet in a painfully tasteful Brooklyn apartment in Roman Polanski's rollicking screw-tightener Carnage to resolve that question. The answer isn't even close to being discovered by the film's end, but one thing is clear: not one of the four adults yammering and needling and passive-agressive-ing the others has got it right...

Carnage is playing now in limited release. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-12-16T14:23:00.000-05:00

New in Books:

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Steve Jobs appears comfortably large and long. In between its covers lies an incredible life fully lived and thoroughly examined. But even at over 580 pages (plus notes and bibliography), it can also feel slight. That is not for any lack of research, as Isaacson appears to have been given the keys to the kingdom when it came to access. Somehow, one of history’s most horrifically Type-A personalities decided to allow this biographer into his life with next to no limitations...

Steve Jobs is available for sale everywhere. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

2011-12-11T17:40:00.001-05:00

In Awards:

New York Film Critics Online

The Artist

Today the New York Film Critics Online -- which I've been lucky to be a member of for some years now -- announced our 2011 film awards, with Michel Hazanavicius's beautiful grin of a silent comedy The Artist taking home best picture.

A Separation

This wasn't that surprising, as The Artist has been sweeping up a bushel of awards from other critics' groups this season. There were a couple left-field awards, though. Best foreign language film went to the Iranian kitchen-sink drama A Separation, which won't even open until later this month, but is well worth seeking out immediately. Also, the comedy Bridesmaids took home a couple awards, more attention that is usual for such a raunchy mainstream comedy, but fully deserved.

Take Shelter

Reuters comments that our selection of Michael Shannon as best actor for his work in Take Shelter was a "dark horse" choice. (Though anybody who has seen his work in that instant classic would have a hard time arguing against his selection.)

The full list of awards follows:

Best Picture: "The Artist"

Best Director: Michel Hazanavicius, "The Artist"

Best Actor: Michael Shannon, "Take Shelter"

Bridesmaids

Runners-up: Michael Fassbender, "Shame" and Gary Oldman, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy"

Best Actress: Meryl Streep, "The Iron Lady"
Runner-up: Viola Davis, "The Help"

Best Supporting Actor: Albert Brooks, "Drive"

Best Supporting Actress: Melissa McCarthy, "Bridesmaids"

Best Screenplay: Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, "The Descendants"

The Tree of Life

Best Foreign-Language Film: "A Separation"

Best Documentary: "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"

Best Animated Feature: "The Adventures of Tintin"

Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki, "The Tree of Life"

Best Use of Music: Ludovic Bource, "The Artist"

Best Ensemble Cast: "Bridesmaids"

Best Debut Director: Joe Cornish, "Attack the Block"

Breakthrough Performer: Jessica Chastain, "The Tree of Life," "The Help," "The Debt," "Take Shelter," "Texas Killing Fields," "Coriolanus"

2011-12-09T20:26:00.001-05:00

New in Theaters:

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

In his slowly paced, dirty-minded adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, director Tomas Alfredson is faithful to the painstaking part of le Carre’s baroque and cynical fictions, almost to a fault. It’s 1973 and the British spy service is in crisis. The old leadership has been shown the door, following a blown operation the year before, in which an agent was shot in a very public and embarrassing way, in a Bucharest alley while trying to bring over a defector. Of course, not long after the new crew is installed at the head of the agency—which everyone calls the Circus—a whisper starts making the rounds that the Soviets have a mole at the highest level. The Circus must then turn to one of the men they’ve just dismissed, the mole-like and ironically named Smiley (Gary Oldman), to bring the matter to light...

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is playing now in limited release. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

2011-12-08T23:44:00.001-05:00

New in Theaters:

Young Adult

Even though it's a comedy of sorts, when Charlize Theron stumbles and stalks through Jason Reitman's Young Adult, she's not playing it for laughs. Diablo Cody's screenplay about Mavis Gray (Theron), a walking disaster of a 37-year-old woman who has mentally never quite left the Darwinian battlefield of the high school cafeteria, has a good share of funny lines, mostly at Mavis's expense. But instead of taking her character's dipsomaniacal misbehavior as an excuse to play it big, bitchy, and goofy (the Cameron Diaz model), Theron delivers the deadened glare that she perfected in Monster. Her Mavis is a selfish terror with an endless array of bad habits whom the film is somehow able to use both for shocked laughs and eventually pity. This isn't dysfunction, it's insanity...

Young Adult is opening this week in limited release. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-12-01T21:52:00.001-05:00

Filmology:

December 2nd

Today's entry from Filmology is Match Point (2005), Woody Allen's icepick-sharp and sensual morality play (starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johansson as an on-the-make couple set loose in London) that not only marked his escape from New York but signaled the return of a great filmmaker.

My book, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to a Complete Film Education, is available in both paperback and ebook formats.

2011-12-01T21:46:00.001-05:00

New in Theaters:

Rampart

It’s been 17 years since viewers were shocked to see Woody Harrelson as a full-blooded monster (thank you, Oliver Stone). But it’s still hard to picture him as a straight-up bad guy. Most of the villains he plays are amoral opportunists who don’t quite deserve the appellation “evil,” like the bounty hunter in No Country for Old Men. Even when playing the cynical burial unit captain in The Messenger, some of his darkest work, Harrelson twigged to the character’s vulnerability. There’s something different at play in Rampart, which is not just the great starring role he’s deserved for a long time, but also an opportunity for him to explore depravity in a way he hasn’t outside of Natural Born Killers...

Rampart is playing in extremely limited release now. Find it if you can. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

2011-11-25T18:30:00.001-05:00

New in Theaters:
A Dangerous Method

The history of pairing historical figures in fictional films is a mostly unfortunate one -- bold-face names facing off in situations contrived for maximum melodrama. David Cronenberg's scalpel-sharp rendering of the psychosexual triangle between Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Sabina Spielrein (a patient, and later therapist in her own right, who fascinated them both) almost falls prey to this failing. But a trio of astonishingly committed performances and a taut screenplay free of hyperbole and overstatement keep this drama relatively free of melodramatic pitfalls, while still relating a fully engaging story of an intellectual love triangle...
A Dangerous Method is now playing in limited release; check it out. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-11-23T17:39:00.001-05:00

New in Theaters:

The Muppets

One of the great things about Jim Henson's Muppets shows and films was really just how much of the Muppets there were in them. Sure, humans continually popped into frame -- whether it was Steve Martin mugging for his ten seconds of screen time or Charles Grodin playing baddie. But mostly Henson stuck to his gloriously personable sock puppet weirdos destroying the set or bringing the house down with a big musical number. So while it's fantastic to see Jason Segel bringing the guys back to the big screen in proper form, it's disconcerting to see humans so prominently displayed. Amy Adams certainly does pull off a sweet solo number with admirable flash, but wouldn't it have been better with a backup chorus led by Rizzo the Rat?...

The Muppets is playing in all theaters in all cities right now. Go see it. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-11-20T12:15:00.001-05:00

New in Theaters:

Happy Feet Two

Let’s take a moment to reflect on the true strangeness of the original Happy Feet. That it came from George Miller might have seemed dissonant, but only if we’d forgotten that he’d already abandoned Mad Max for Babe. The premise was surely odd by design, a curiously colorful animated riot of emperor penguins who created explosive, island-spanning dance numbers set to Prince tunes and some classic American songbook numbers. (Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman dueting on Prince’s “Kiss” and the like.) The film was all excess, from the ADD-soundtrack to the soft-headed rot about “finding your heartsong” to the big-eyed mugging of those adorable penguins. Like a Pixar film with even less sense of shame, Happy Feet went for the brass ring in nearly every scene and then clobbered you over the head with it...

Happy Feet Two is playing everywhere now. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

2011-11-17T22:54:00.001-05:00

New on DVD:

The Trip

Not far into Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip you get the sensation that the filmmakers’ driving impulse behind it could well be that they just wanted to have a laugh and maybe get somebody else to pay for it. Perhaps Winterbottom and his leads Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon did just want to have a good time and see if a movie came out of it. As these things go, there’s little chance that that’s how it actually worked out. The most relaxed-looking films are usually the most meticulously plotted. Well-planned or not, The Trip delivers itself to screen with a confidently larkish attitude. That this casual-seeming a work could have turned out to be one of the year’s standout comedies and probably the most purely perfect film Winterbottom has yet made, is one of those gifts that moviegoers so rarely receive...

The Trip is out now on DVD. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

2011-11-13T20:18:00.001-05:00

New in Theaters:
Into the Abyss

It’s a jarring sensation at first, the sound and feel of Werner Herzog hovering behind the camera. His icy, sarcastic skepticism and blaringly Teutonic English don’t seem to be the right fit. This appears to be, after all, a very well-intentioned film about a pair of death-penalty cases in Texas. Herzog has long seemed more at home in the company of aberrant outsiders and inhospitable corners of nature whose whole existence seems to shrug laughingly at human endeavor. But here, in the quiet suburban cul-de-sacs, long and empty roads, and matter-of-fact state charnel houses of East Texas, Herzog plugs into a multilayered saga that unfurls some intensely human truths. It could be his masterpiece...

Into the Abyss is playing in limited release now. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

2011-11-10T21:24:00.001-05:00

New in Theaters:

Melancholia

Music from the overture to Wagner’s Tristan und Isoldethunders out of the speakers at the startling prelude to Lars vonTrier’s latest attempted outrage. He weaves a glimmering dreamscapeof apocalypse as the music ripples and yearns. Lightning flickersfrom a woman’s fingers, a bride running in a forest is ensnared bydark vines, a woman carrying a child screams in silent slow-motionas her feet sink into quicksand-like grass and at the climax of itall, a planet smashes into Earth like a hammer of the gods. It’s adoomed marriage, writ large...

Melancholia is playing now in limited release. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

2011-10-27T22:12:00.000-04:00

New in Books:
The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael

If the average person who cares about such things were asked to choose a greatest American film critic, but for some outliers stumping for Andrew Sarris, Roger Ebert, or (if particularly nettlesome) James Agee, they would generally go with Pauline Kael. She wielded criticism like a weapon and praise like a benediction. She flouted the received wisdoms of the day and demanded that while the great arthouse auteurs receive their due, so too should those skilled practitioners of the lower orders of cinema. Kael won the National Book Award and inspired a mini-legion of fellow movie-crazed critics who came of age during the great flowering of that American art form and tried to keep its flames burning, even when the culture as a whole moved on to other loves...

The Age of Movies is on sale in finer (and not-so-fine) bookstores everywhere. You can read my full review at The Millions.

2011-10-24T06:46:00.002-04:00

New in Theaters:

Being Elmo

Constance Marks's documentary about Kevin Clash, the puppeteer behind the high-giggling and hug-happy little red monster who sits at the nexus of a public-television marketing dynamo, could easily be accused of being little more than a feature-length advertisement for said creature. It doesn't have any interest in posing the hard or even borderline difficult questions of its subject or digging into some of the complexities behind his puppet's appeal, and is so enraptured by Clash that there are numerous times when it seems he (a director and producer himself) is more the director than Marks. This doesn't make Being Elmo a bad film, just a mediocre one that could have tried for something more...

Being Elmo is playing in theaters now. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-10-20T20:48:00.001-04:00

New in Theaters:

Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone

It's nice of course for a pioneering band like Fishbone to have the likes of Gwen Stefani (No Doubt), Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Perry Farrell (Jane's Addiction), ?uestlove (The Roots), Vernon Reid (Living Colour), and Ice-T (Ice-T) singing their praises in this bittersweet documentary. One person after another comes forward to testify to how the band's dynamic mixture of ska-funk and punk, and blazingly intense live shows inspired them all and convinced them that this was destined to be one of the great bands of our time. The problem is that the breakthrough never happened. As pleasant as the encomiums are, they don't pay the rent. This leads singer and lead visionary Angelo Moore -- reduced to living with his mother -- to muse on the irony of "living a lifestyle of famous but not rich"...

Everyday Sunshine is playing now in limited release. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-10-19T22:07:00.001-04:00

New in Books:

Zone One

If nothing else, Colson Whitehead’s new novel – a zombie fiction that manages to be both unabashedly immersed in the genre while still tenaciously clinging (for better and for worse) to his usual traits and interests – understands and appreciates the fast-then-slow creep of the zombie menace which threatens the tattered shreds of society. Though imbued with the jarring frights that bring the undead lunging out at its characters from unseen corners, Zone One digs deeply into the horrors of the slow-motion nightmare, where collapse starts to seem not just a possibility but a certainty...

Zone One will be on sale next week. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

2011-10-16T20:40:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Bombay Beach

It’s a hardscrabble collection of wastrels, striversand desert rats who make their home in Bombay Beach, a scragglycommunity on California’s Salton Sea, that massive inland lake oncepushed as a recreational paradise. What Alma Har’el’s camera captures isa ghostly afterimage left behind once Bombay Beach’s initialpromise as a resort town faded (glimpses of which are seen inhalf-comic, half-tragic old booster footage); it’s like the dark,David Lynch side of the desert iconoclasts from Nick Brandestini’s Darwin...

Bombay Beach is playing now in limited release; check it out. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

2011-10-12T23:14:00.001-04:00

New in Books:

Reamde

Nobody ever accused Neal Stephenson of not going far enough. But with his new novel, the hyper-knowledgeable and impeccably entertaining author might well be thought of as coasting. Of course, in his case, coasting means knocking out a thousand-plus-page hyperbolic steam engine of a globetrotting thriller with apparently as much ease as Stephen King might have penning a novella before breakfast...

Reamde is available in bookstores now. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

2011-10-07T21:09:00.001-04:00

New in Theaters:

Hell and Back Again

As long as there has been war there have been warriors, and as long as there have been warriors there has been the question of how they stop being warriors once the war (at least for them) is over? As Danfung Dennis's grievously evocative documentary shows, warriors don't stop fighting once they leave the field of battle. All too often, their new enemy is themselves...

Hell and Back Again is now playing in limited release. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-10-05T07:17:00.003-04:00

New in Theaters:

Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

One of the first memorable things you see in Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, Nick Broomfield's flat, repetitive fizzle of a gotcha documentary is the filmmaker himself, clad in a bright red-and-black hunting jacket crunching through the Alaskan snow, in search of his prey. There isn't much else that is memorable in the film which is of Broomfield and his co-director Joan Churchill's doing, though. It's a clattering stream of media from other sources strung together by Broomfield's hapless seeking of a sit-down with the governor herself and interviews with axe-grinders. That many of them have completely legitimate issues to air with the former governor is utterly disserved by Broomfield's unprofessional approach...

Sarah Palin: You Betcha! is playing now in limited release. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-09-30T06:51:00.002-04:00

New on DVD:

Community - The Complete Second Season

The first season of NBC’s Community was something of a suicide mission, albeit one with some crazed integrity. Launched into the network’s Thursday-night lineup alongside stalwarts like The Office and 30 Rock, it was intended to be another of that evening’s “smart” sitcoms that eschewed the live studio audiences and crudely normative, housebound mechanics that kept powerhouses like Two and a Half Men chugging along, no matter how unfunny they were. The tradeoff made sense for the network: build a clutch of boundary-pushing shows that might attract smaller but (it must be said) more educated audiences that advertisers would pay to reach. (Why the network thought the disaster that was Outsourced fit into this mold is another question.)...

The second season of Community is out on DVD now. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

2011-09-24T18:06:00.004-04:00

New in Theaters:

Moneyball

Brad Pitt seems ambivalent about Moneyball. As Billy Beane, the onetime star pro baseball rookie who washed out and ended up as general manager for the perennial underdog team the Oakland A’s, Pitt carries himself just right. He has the loose-limbed swagger of the former athlete who never let himself go physically, as well as the wary combativeness of a man who has to work at getting along with people. Beane is a man who never had anything come easy to him and thinks, correctly, that he has to fight for all that he wants. Pitt brings off this performance with a tired ease that’s too easy for him – it’s like watching Russell Crowe play an over-the-hill detective or George Clooney a washed-up gigolo...

Moneyball is playing everywhere now. You can read my full review at Short Ends and Leader.

2011-09-09T20:35:00.002-04:00

New in Theaters:

Semper Fi: Always Faithful

“If I die tomorrow, my family gets nothing,” says Denita McCall,one of the former Marines profiled in Semper Fi, RachelLibert and Tony Hardmon’s inspiring documentary about theaftereffects of polluted water at the Corps’ largest base, CampLejeune in North Carolina. But she also points out where shereceived her stubbornness from—the very Marine Corps that she isnow attempting to get help from: “They trained me to be this way"...

Semper Fi: Always Faithful is playing in limited release. You can read my full review at Film Journal International.

2011-08-24T22:27:00.000-04:00

New on DVD:

Miller's Crossing

"So it's clear what I'm saying?" The Italian gangster jaws at the screen, the camera jammed right up into his jowly face. Returning the man's imploring hostility with steely boredom from the other side of the polished desk (the whole room a gleaming imitation of some robber baron's den of power), the Irish gangster grumbles back, "As ... mud." From that point on in the Coen brothers' headache-inducing comic-gangster farrago, it's easy to get lost, but that's no matter. The only trail of bread crumbs one needs to follow leads back to the one character who matters: the man standing behind his Irish gangster boss: Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), the smartest man in whatever the hell city this is supposed to be...

Miller's Crossing actually has been out on DVD for awhile. But now you can behold all its cold beauty in Blu-ray. My full review is at filmcritic.com.

2011-08-19T07:09:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Conan the Barbarian

How does a mighty barbarian with a heart o' gold make his way in the world? If one listens to the portentous voiceover in this laughably unnecessary film, it's a healthy dose of "slaying, thieving, surviving." Which only makes sense, as what else is a kid to do after his father is butchered in front of his eyes by a bug-eyed father-and-daughter team who really should have worked out their issues in therapy rather than on the bodies of unlucky barbarians? Familial bonds broken, a pre-teen Conan (Leo Howard) sets out for adventure, vengeance, and -- we're led to think -- resolution of his serious case of survivor's guilt. The cliché-littered, lazy script gives him plenty of opportunity for the first two but not so much the last...

The new Conan the Barbarian (no Arnie, sorry) opens today all over the place. You can read my review at filmcritic.com.

2011-08-13T06:11:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Better This World

The F.B.I. spends a lot of time and resources hunting down dangerous criminals and devious terrorists. It also exerts a lot of effort in the pursuit and prosecution of kids like David McKay and Brad Crowder, the so-called "Texas Two" who took a few wrong turns and ended up the main attractions of a three-ring circus of entrapment, paranoia, and dubious motives. How it all came about is a curious and occasionally sickening sight. Documentarians Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega take the story of a how a seemingly hapless pair of activists stumbled into the harsh spotlight of the American security establishment and turn it into an oblique indictment of a society in which fear trumps all...

Better This World is playing now in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-08-09T06:50:00.002-04:00

New in Books:

Millennium People

In the cold latter-day novels of the late J.G. Ballard (1930–2009), the entire idea of science-fiction almost seems passé. Instead of imagining the far future, or a world of today turned upside down by some deus ex machine of a calamity, the novels of this onetime Pied Piper of the speculative fiction movement didn’t ask for much if any suspension of disbelief. In books like Cocaine Nights and Rushing to Paradise, Ballard instead plumbed the neuroses of the modern world by taking a particular ethnographic strata and bombarding it with a combination of satirical overkill and microscopically-observed sociological investigation. The people in these books were trapped in bell jars of their own downwardly-spiraling imaginations, occasionally threatening to take the rest of the world with them...

J.G. Ballard's Millennium People is on sale now in finer bookstores everywhere. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

2011-08-05T21:22:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

You know you’re in trouble these days when even James Franco can’t be bothered to deliver much of a performance. Even in sophomoric mistakes like Your Highness, Franco showed up ready and willing to engage energetically with the material. But in Rupert Wyatt’s energetic but ultimately ho-hum genetic twist on the Planet of the Apes origin story, Franco’s character doesn’t do much but furrow his brow and make bad decisions...

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is playing in multiplexes across this apparently doomed planet. You can read my full review at Film Journal International.

2011-08-04T11:52:00.000-04:00

New in Books:

Busy Monsters

Charles Homar, William Giraldi’s wholly untrustworthy narrator in this 110-proof jug of moonshine of a novel, isn’t one for half-measures. Though ostensibly an adult of independent means, he moons and glooms like a lovesick teenager at nearly all times. He’s given to flights of rhetorical excess so severe that the state police could likely write him up for it. The lies tumble forth from his mouth and pen in a nearly unstoppable flood. And he’s driven to altercations as though a moth to flame, particularly over the most innocuous of subjects...

William Giraldi's Busy Monsters is on sale now. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

2011-07-31T18:38:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

El Bulli: Cooking in Progress

Rumors and hyperbole always swirled around El Bulli, the fabled restaurant near Barcelona, as thickly and incessantly as foodies buzzed around its culinary ring-leader, Ferran Adria. Stories about Adria's fantastical offerings were traded among the culinary jet-set and the kind of gastronomic adventurers who photograph what they're eating for their blogs, with rapt and lavish descriptions of things like trout egg tempura, tagliatelli of shaved foie gras, something called popcorn clouds, and all that liquid nitrogen. His team of chefs were lauded for their experimental approach to food, which deconstructed ingredients and then remixed them into fantastic new creations, much a DJ might whip up a thrilling new composition out of old clips and samples...

The documentary El Bulli: Cooking in Progress is playing now in limited release -- seeing it is the closest you're likely to get to experiencing Adria's cooking. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-07-29T06:46:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Cowboys and Aliens

Cowboys and Aliens is one of those films where the hero can’t help but stride into each shot in poster-ready iconic fashion – Black Swan and Iron Man cinematographer Matthew Libatique does a smart job of framing Daniel Craig against the sun-burnt desert, those ice-blue eyes blazing – but lesser characters like Sam Rockwell’s nebbishy bartender get squinched into the corner. It’s also the kind of film where the town preacher (Clancy Brown) is a tough, whiskey-drinking sort who dispenses hard-bitten theological bon mots during target practice...

Cowboys and Aliens is now playing everywhere in the known universe. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

2011-07-29T06:38:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

The Guard

Taking a page from the darker verges of his In Bruges performance (already a pretty black piece of work, there), Brendan Gleeson stalks onto the screen in The Guard like his character couldn't decide whether to get up for work that morning or shoot himself in the head. Not because he's depressed, but maybe just to see what it was like. For today, Sgt. Gerry Boyle (Gleeson) is on the scene, but who knows what tomorrow will bring?...

The Guard is playing now in limited release; check it out. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-07-21T22:36:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Captain America: The First Avenger

As muscular, stiff, shiny, and dull as its star, Joe Johnston's high-gloss take on the last building block of Marvel's 2012 tentpole Avengers film is in the end little more than a dutiful origin story for a superhero who has frankly long been something of a back-bencher. Unlike some comic-book franchises, however (did Spawn, for instance, ever have a chance of being anything but terrible?), this one had promise. It's the story of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a sickly shrimp of a kid from Brooklyn who's repeatedly declared unfit for military service at the start of World War II. By dint of his scrappiness and plucky good-heartedness, Rogers is accepted into a top-secret program where he's injected with a serum that turns him into a buffed figure of herculean might. Watch out, Nazis!...

Captain America: The First Avenger is playing most everywhere. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-07-15T16:17:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Conan O'Brien Can't Stop

What Conan O’Brien can’t stop doing is punching people. He lunges at them, pummeling their shoulders. Sometimes they hit back, but not as hard. Because, hey, he’s the boss, and he needs to unwind. This habit is one of several exposed in Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop. Rodman Flender’s keen-eyed documentary begins just after the battle over The Tonight Show, which involved O’Brien, Jay Leno, and the NBC brass in late 2009 and early 2010. When the dust settled, O’Brien walked away many millions of dollars richer while Leno had the show. As part of his severance, O’Brien could not appear on television for six months.

Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is in theaters now. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

2011-07-13T06:46:00.000-04:00

New in Books:

A Dance with Dragons

There are times when you just don't even want to hear about another book. Each year is much like the last, with the number of should-read and can’t-wait-to-read titles piling up in your mind and on the shelf and under the desk and spilling out of your bag and into the hallway. But word had come from a friend about an author named Naomi Novik. She’d written a novel that he said was just superb historical fiction, with expertly realized descriptions of the arcana of Napoleonic War-era naval combat that landed right in the middle of the Venn diagram of our intersecting interests. Even better, he said, there are dragons, and they talk. I was hooked before even cracking the spine...

George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons went on sale yesterday. You can read my complete article (about Martin and other lengthy series) at the Barnes and Noble Review.

2011-07-08T06:45:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Repeat a distorted version of the truth often enough, and it becomes accepted fact, regardless of the realities on the ground. This verity has rarely been more vividly evoked than in Chad Freidrichs's moving and revelatory documentary about the legacy of St. Louis's infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex. As Freidrichs shows, the lessons supposedly learned from this ignominious episode weren't entirely wrong but they certainly weren't all correct, either. As usual, it was the poor and powerless who received the blame, while the powers that be escaping censure and pointing fingers back at those whom they were to have been helping...

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is playing now in limited release. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-07-01T10:12:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

If a Tree Falls

If you were looking for the least usual suspect to be hauled in as part of a terrorism case, then Daniel McGowan would be a good fit. An average-looking kid from Queens, the son of a cop, who worked in public-relations and environmental cause offices, McGowan was arrested in 2005 for being part of the Earth Liberation Front. A radical environmental activist group, ELF had been labeled domestic terrorists by the government and more vividly branded "eco-terrorists" by the media. Co-directors Marshall Curry (Street Fight) and Sam Cullman come to this fascinating story via a personal route - Curry's wife was McGowan's employer when he was arrested - but handle it all in an impressively judicious manner...

If a Tree Falls is playing now in limited release and is well worth checking out. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-06-26T22:47:00.001-04:00

New on DVD:

Kiss Me Deadly

For sheer brazen weirdness, it's hard to top Robert Aldrich's nervy noir 1955 adaptation of the skull-busting Mickey Spillane novel. It's a mystery that never gets solved, and a thriller that creeps more than thrills. The closest one gets to an explanation of who's behind everything is a cynical, tired reference by the hero's gal Friday to "nameless ones who kill people for the great whatsit." All the confusion could be a good example of why directors shouldn't make films out of books they have no respect for, but then it's hard to say that a greater fidelity to the source material would have improved matters much...

Kiss Me Deadly is available in a spiffy new edition from Criterion. You can read my full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-06-24T00:59:00.000-04:00

New in Books:
What?

For an author who has arguably made much of his career out of answering queries that you didn’t know you wanted answers to (how important was salt to the development of human civilization?), Mark Kurlansky has some nerve positing an entire book as one long inquiry. Granted, What? isn’t exactly a tome, at 96 pages it’s the nonfiction equivalent of a novella – the tomette...

What? is available in finer bookstores most everywhere. You can read my full review at Re:Print.

2011-06-20T22:15:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

United Red Army

United Red Army is a three-hour-plus treatment of two groups of student radicals who were forged in the fire of protests against Japan's involvement with the United States during the Vietnam War, before unifying as the United Red Army. A lengthy screed of grainy news footage, backed by a deep-voiced and emphatic narrator, and punctuated with some introductory dramatic recreations, sets the scene. From marching and battling in the streets, some of the students are forged as would-be warrior radicals in the crucible of a government crackdown, going underground to continue their "revolution"...

United Red Army opened recently in limited release. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

2011-06-18T11:18:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times

There's an old joke which says that the second title to roll off Gutenberg's printing press after the bible was a book on the death of the publishing industry. Whatever the media, predictions have been made about its demise nearly ever since its inception. This drumbeat of doom has been particularly thunderous during the past couple years when it comes to print newspapers, with their ad revenue ravaged by digital competitors and a readership depleted by Twitterized 21st-century information overload. Not long after an infamous January 2009 feature ran in the Atlantic asking whether the New York Times could be out of business by that May, director Andrew Ross embedded himself at the Old Gray Lady herself to watch the storm play out...

Page One is playing now in limited release, make sure to check it out. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-06-16T19:56:00.000-04:00

New on DVD:

Public Speaking

Barbed-wire raconteur and bon mot factory Fran Lebowitz has many theories about the proper methods of creating and appreciating art, and few of them would be likely to be found in the frequently touchy-feely literature on the subject: "Sitting in bars, smoking cigarettes, that's the history of art." To Lebowitz, holding forth in Martin Scorsese's amber-lit, relaxed bar-stool hangout of a documentary on her, the craft of making art is a social phenomenon - one has to be in the thick of things to accurately mine them for one's art. Fortunately for viewers, Lebowitz is no tortured soul of the Barton Fink variety, even if she is just about as famously blocked...

Public Speaking is now available on DVD from HBO. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-06-15T06:49:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:
Road to Nowhere

Filmmakers from Fellini to Ferrara who have centered their work around a director character have had the foresight to make the man (it’s always a man, of course) a fool. At best he’s a naïve dreamer, at worst he’s a destructive cretin. Either way, he’s utterly complicit in his own demise. It’s difficult to know exactly how seriously long-absent director Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop) is taking his somewhat ridiculous director character, Mitch Haven (Tygh Runyan), in this densely packed and deliberately obscure film. That uncertainty unfortunately also extends to the film itself, which skirts laughability more than once but also casts a certain kind of spell...

Road to Nowhere is playing now in limited release. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

2011-06-09T06:44:00.001-04:00

Filmology:
June 9th

"Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night."

Today's entry from Filmology is Dead Man (1995), Jim Jarmusch's gorgeous, deadpan-funny, bloody, and poetic pseudo-Western starring Johnny Depp as a hapless quester named William Blake.

My book, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to a Complete Film Education, is available in both paperback and ebook formats.

2011-06-05T17:33:00.000-04:00

New on DVD:

The Great Dictator

Charlie Chaplin plays a Hitler-like dictator in this controversial wartime satire, as well as a good-natured Jewish barber who is then mistaken for the dictator. Hijinks and tragedy and speechifying ensue. The film is not always as funny as it could be and is frequently too innocent for its own good (a common complaint with Chaplin). But nevertheless, this is still better than just about anything else the Tramp ever made...

The Great Dictator is out now in a great two-disc set from Criterion. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-06-03T06:57:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Beginners

Sadness is layered on top of sadness in Mike Mills's seriocomic account of a determinedly gloomy young man's (Ewan McGregor) coming to terms with the death of his recently-out-of-the-closet father (an Oscar-worthy Christopher Plummer). It comes incrementally at first, parsed by a stuttering narrative that can't seem to decide what the film is actually about, but by the end is washing over you in choking waves. There is little movement here, rather a lot more running in circles, much like the admittedly adorable Jack Russell, Arthur, who is able to speak to the mourning protagonist in subtitles. Were it not for a trio of magnificently calibrated performances, the whole thing would be less than unbearable...

Beginners opens today in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-05-26T22:45:00.002-04:00

New in Theaters:

The Tree of Life

No matter how deep Terrence Malick loses himself in imagery, those vistas which have captivated from Badlands to The New World, he was normally able to anchor them at least fleetingly in some blooded human drama. In The Tree of Life, however, he comes closer than ever before to severing ties with story nearly completely. This leap into bold abstraction is as awe-inspiring as it is irksome—in other words, par for the course in terms of Malick's quixotic career...

The Tree of Life -- starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and some of the most jawdropping imagery ever put to film -- opens Friday. See it on the big screen, if you care about cinema. Read the full review at Film Journal International.

2011-05-21T15:57:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Last Night

The possibilities and ramifications of infidelity get a thorough workout in Massey Tadjedin's moody romance Last Night, starring Keira Knightley and Sam Worthington (Avatar). As both halves of a seemingly unhappy couple spar on the same night with potential affairs, this perfectly fine scenario settles too easily into an underperformed exercise in what-if. The promise of the film that this could have been is continually receding to the horizon the longer it goes on...

Last Night is playing now. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-05-20T06:51:00.002-04:00

Filmology:
May 20th

"No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error. "

Today's entry from Filmology is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick's eye-opening science-fiction masterstroke that continues to astound as much as it mystifies.

My book, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to a Complete Film Education, is available in both paperback and ebook formats.

2011-05-19T08:05:00.000-04:00

New on DVD:

Solaris

In Andrei Tarkovsky's addictive, serenely maddening masterpiece of love and obsession in outer orbit, the dead just won't stay dead. But neither are they alive. Like the vision of Lazarus reborn which Martin Scorsese conjured in such creepy fashion for The Last Temptation of Christ, Tarkovsky's reanimated souls are never quite of this world. They are human, of a sort, but just enough to make the protagonist here think twice about killing one. Again...

The 1972 Solaris (not the 2002 remake by Steven Soderbergh) will be available next week in a superb 2-disc set from Criterion. Read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-05-13T23:44:00.001-04:00

New in Theaters:

True Legend

Yuen Woo-Ping's rabidly fun and cameo-packed wuxia opens with a note informing viewers that the setting is China, 1861: "It is a turbulent time." When you have a villain with armor scales grown into his skin and a hero who trains with invisible gods in a drunken stupor, yes, it's safe to say that things are turbulent. This turns out to be good for the audience, less so for many of the people on-screen...

True Legend is playing now...in some places. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-05-11T22:20:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

City of Life and Death

It would be easy to write off City of Life and Death, Lu Chuan’s epic drama on the capture and subsequent pillaging of Nanking by Japanese soldiers in 1937, as an attempt to give the Chinese their own Schindler’s List. The parallels are hard to ignore: exquisite black-and-white cinematography, heart-stopping brutality, crowds of terrified civilians in a tightly enclosed space, and slaughter being held at bay by the flimsiest of stratagems...

City of Life and Death is playing now in limited release. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

2011-05-08T17:51:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Beautiful Darling

James Rasin's unfinished-feeling film on Warhol star Candy Darling falls into the category of documentaries that should have been many times more fascinating than they actually are. This is, after all, the story of a boy from a prototypically sterile Long Island suburb who grew up as James Slattery but later reinvented himself as a self-created movie star, using nothing more than a blonde wig, a high and breathy Marilyn Monroe voice, and incredible amounts of makeup. The persona created was that of the old-time film star, an aloof creature of the old studio system who just happened to be gracing the mortals with her presence for a short time before swanning off to her next shoot...

Beautiful Darling is playing now in (very) limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-05-06T09:49:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Exporting Raymond

"Family is a universal thing," Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal notes in his light-hearted documentary about translating his sitcom for a Russian audience. "But unfortunately, so is show business." This explains the various producers sitting around with nothing much constructive to say, and critical casting decisions being made by studio executives who don't seem to know much about comedy, or even television. There isn't much that can explain the wild dogs wandering around the grounds of what is supposedly the biggest and most important Russian film, which also happens to look like an abandoned factory.

Exporting Raymond is playing now in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-05-03T22:44:00.000-04:00

In Film:

2011 Tribeca Film Festvial: Neds and Roadie

Neds tracks the ebb and flow of adolescents in the streets of 1970s Glasgow. Buzz-cut youths with cuffed-jeans and Doc Martens battle like immigrant mobs of early New York with kitchen knives and crow bars, bellowing the names of their respective crews. At the center of one cutthroat melee is John McGill (Conor McCarron), a soft-faced teenager who not long before was a bookish lad terrorized by toughs and teachers alike. Now he beats them bloody for little reason, his once-formidable intellect long forgotten...

My festival reviews of the films Neds and Roadie can be read at PopMatters.

2011-04-30T01:17:00.000-04:00

In Film:

2011 Tribeca Film Festival: Beats, Rhymes and Life and Let the Bullets Fly

Based on the applause that greeted each name appearing in the jazzy animated opening credits of Michael Rapaport’s debut film, it was a crew-heavy audience at the film’s New York premiere. And as the room bounced and cheered with the opening beats of nearly every song, everybody else in the place thought A Tribe Called Quest is about as good as hip-hop ever was. Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest is the sort of movie that gets called a labor of love, but in this case, that’s not a minus...

My festival reviews of the films Beats, Rhymes and Life and Let the Bullets Fly can be read at PopMatters.

2011-04-30T01:09:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

There are few things more off-putting than being repeatedly told how astounding something is, whether it's a work of art or natural phenomena. The thing, whatever it is, should be allowed to speak for itself whenever possible. To drown the object in question with rhetoric that serves only to pump it up, not to actually elucidate its importance, is nearly always to lessen its power. Werner Herzog's latest nonfiction toss-off, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, violates this cardinal rule whenever it's not indulging in 110-proof Herzogiana (not as entertaining or enlightening as in some of his previous works) and some rather beside-the-point 3D trickery...

Cave of Forgotten Dreams opened today in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-04-28T09:25:00.000-04:00

In Film:

2011 Tribeca Film Festival: Koran By Heart and L'Amour Fou

“My parents told me to learn the Koran before everything else,” says Djamil, a 10-year-old boy from Senegal. And he did, working to memorize the entire text in its traditional Arabic script even though he doesn’t speak any Arabic. “I like the way the letters look,” Djamil says. How much he or any of the children taking part in the 2010 International Holy Koran Competition in Cairo comprehend the words they are reciting is a question unanswered in Greg Barker’s superb documentary, Koran By Heart...

My festival reviews of the Tribeca documentaries Koran By Heart and L'Amour Fou are at PopMatters.

2011-04-22T19:17:00.000-04:00

In Film:

The 2011 Tribeca Film Festival - Day One

It was a good and appreciative crowd on Thursday, 21 April. The previous night, which opened the 10th Tribeca Film Festival, had seen the usual throngs over at the gala premiere of the new Cameron Crowe documentary on Elton John and Leon Russell, The Union. It was a strange choice for the Festival’s first film, being neither New York-identified nor attention-grabbing, but then Tribeca has had problems like this nearly from its start...

I'll be posting more coverage of this year's Tribeca Film Festival next week. My review of one of the first night's films, Tsui Hark's gonzo chopsocky mystery flick Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame is at PopMatters.

2011-04-20T17:52:00.000-04:00

In Memoriam:

Tim Hetherington

The photojournalist Tim Hetherington was reported today to have been killed while covering the fighting in Libya. He is pictured above (right) with Sebastian Junger. The two of them co-directed last year's Restrepo, a studiously apolitical but nevertheless passionately delivered documentary about an embattled company of American soldiers in the rugged Korengal valley in eastern Afghanistan; review here. (Since then the area has, for all intents and purposes, been abandoned to the Taliban.)

Hetherington's brave, intensely personal photography was the perfect complement to Junger's respectful and engaging portrait of these hard-bitten men fighting in thin air and murky circumstances at the ends of the world. There aren't many who dared to go where he went and document what he did.

2011-04-20T08:58:00.000-04:00

Filmology:
April 20th

"He says the sun came out last night. He says it sang to him."

Today's entry from Filmology is Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Steven Spielberg's stunning science-fiction fantasia of obsession, mystery, and wonder.

My book, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to a Complete Film Education, is available in both paperback and ebook formats.

2011-04-20T08:42:00.000-04:00

In Books:

60 Minutes, Jon Krakauer, and Three Cups of Tea

Three Cups of Tea has proved a smashing success, with millions of copies sold and readers thrilling to Mortenson’s stories from the ends of the world, which seem to be equal parts hair-raising adventure and heartbreaking pathos. The stories which 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft relates from the books – Mortenson dragging his exhausted self into a remote village whose poor residents then took care of him, his later kidnapping by the Taliban – are all the sort of thing we want to believe can happen. But Kroft isn’t the one who tells us that Mortenson’s stories might all be bunk. He leaves that to Jon Krakauer (Where Men Win Glory, Into Thin Air), exactly the kind of tenacious bloodhound nobody wants on their tail...

This article, "We Will Be Fooled Again," can be found at Re:Print.

2011-04-18T18:52:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Armadillo

Honesty is rare in films, even documentaries. So it's particularly thrilling to find that Janus Metz's aggressive, boldly-directed story of Danish soldiers in Afghanistan doesn't pretend that they don't find war to be the most exciting thing they could ever experience. That isn't to say that Metz doesn't present a rounded view of what these young men go through, from tedium and confusion to gut-clenching horror and spiritual anomie. Some will come back from the war physically broken, many of them scarred in ways that may take years to become fully visible. But many of them will want to come back, because that's where the action is...

Armadillo is playing now in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-04-13T22:48:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Blank City

"It was like our lives were movies," says one of the filmmakers profiled by Danhier early in the documentary, and it's easy to see why. As the director stitches together grainy black-and-white footage of New York from the late 1970s, she slips in blips from the work of avant-punk filmmakers like Amos Poe and Eric Mitchell and sets it all to a pulsating metallic and arrhythmic soundtrack. The sensation is one of danger, bleak beauty, and possibility—anarchic freedom amidst the rubble...

Blank City is playing now in limited release. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

2011-04-11T20:25:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Meek's Cutoff

Kelly Reichardt's newest odyssey into the big blank spaces of the American West is less Western or anti-Western than it is a masterful bad trip littered with foolish expectations and "we should have" regrets. Working with a mostly minimal and dust-dry script by Jon Raymond, Reichardt sets a band of nineteenth-century explorers loose in the wilderness and watches as their bonds are strained to the snapping point by the elements and the great, gaping void of the unknown. It's a gritty fable of fate that should rightfully move Reichardt into the top ranks of American indie filmmakers...

Meek's Cutoff is playing in limited release now, and will be expanding around the country throughout the spring and (hopefully) summer. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-04-10T23:00:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Your Highness

Just a couple of weeks after Sucker Punch lulled audiences into stupefaction with its video-game aesthetic and faux female empowerment, here comes another mostly brain-dead genre mashup that just can’t feature enough explosions or barely clad actresses. The difference this time is that the early adolescent males that Your Highness targets likely won’t be bothered to look up from their phones long enough to notice...

Your Highness is playing now throughout the land. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

2011-04-05T06:43:00.003-04:00

Filmology:
April 5th

"But you are, Blanche, you are in that chair!"

Today's entry from Filmology is What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Robert Aldrich's utterly demented circus of camp sadism and black humor, featuring perhaps the only cinematic evidence of Joan Crawford being upstaged, by a frighteningly on-point Bette Davis willing to chew every millimeter of scenery.

My book, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to a Complete Film Education, is now for sale in both paperback and ebook formats.

2011-04-03T11:39:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Trust

There is a better place for films like David Schwimmer's Trust than a theater, and that place is the Movie of the Week slot on broadcast television. Working from an Andy Bellin and Robert Festinger script that manages to be spot-on regarding the story's subject but hopelessly banal in terms of character, Schwimmer's issue drama starts in one of those sublimely happy upper-tier suburban film families for whom tragedy is always just about twenty minutes away from striking..

Trust is playing now. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-04-02T08:27:00.000-04:00

Now in Theaters:

Potiche

There's an old and all-too-true joke that asks: if the French are funny, and sex is funny, why are French sex comedies never funny? Maybe it's a question of translation. Happily, François Ozon's latest, a sublimely goofy (and apparently loose) adaptation of the popular (in France) 1970s play Potiche, blasts that rule right out of the water. That it does so under the direction of a man better known for serious arthouse fare like Under the Sand and while starring two of France's most awards-encrusted stars -- neither of whom have ever been known for bringing the silly -- is all the more enjoyably unexpected...

Potiche is now playing in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-03-25T07:17:00.002-04:00

New in Theaters:
Sucker Punch

Zack Snyder’s latest fanboy valentine is more like a light, tapping slap than a sucker punch, if you must know. It tells us many things, none of them necessary. We learn that there are many potentially cool ways to mix up World War I battlefields, dragon-lurked fantasy castles, samurai, and out-of-control-trains, if all you’ve really got to worry about is special effects. Actresses in thigh-high stockings, miniskirts, pigtails, and midriff tops sporting high-end assault rifles will make for a killer poster. When an asylum feels compelled to double-advertise itself as being for the “mentally insane” (as opposed to what, the physically insane?), you can be assured that your stay there will not be pleasant. Scott Glenn does not have an inside voice...

Sucker Punch is playing everywhere, now. You can read the full review at Short Ends and Leader.

2011-03-24T16:48:00.000-04:00

New in Theaters:

Making the Boys

Timing is everything, especially in the arts. The premiere of Mart Crowley's groundbreaking play The Boys in the Band was perfectly timed at the crackling nexus of late-1960s liberated sexuality and drama. Its 1970 film version, though, had the bad fortune to open in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, when people were less-interested in stories about (supposedly) self-hating gays. That's the story, at least, that Crayton Robey's thoughtful but slightly over-indulgent documentary tries with limited success to disprove...

Making the Boys opens tomorrow in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-03-23T07:16:00.000-04:00

Filmology:
March 23rd

"Leave your troubles outside."

Today's entry from Filmology is Cabaret (1972), Bob Fosse's flawed, wicked, decadent and ludicrously catchy musical about dancehall girls and the death of the Weimar Republic. Plus Liza!

My book, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to a Complete Film Education, is now for sale in both paperback and ebook formats.

2011-03-19T13:01:00.001-04:00

New in Theaters:

The Lincoln Lawyer

It's been a long time since it seemed like Matthew McConaughey actually seemed interested in being an actor as opposed to a lanky shirtless grin for producers to hang a blond actress off of. With his new legal drama, he still doesn't evince much interest in thespian pursuits - a few wry wrinkles of that taut brow and some sly, bourbon-dipped line readings do the trick, as per usual - but fortunately, some of the people sharing the screen with him do. With William H. Macy, John Leguizamo, and Bryan Cranston cutting in from the sidelines, the film is occasionally rescued from its overly-busy legal shenanigans, but the person best suited to do the job, its star, is more often than not missing in action...

The Lincoln Lawyer opened wide on Friday. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-03-16T06:32:00.000-04:00

Filmology:
March 16th

"He'll be a typical intellectual, disagreeable and impotent."

Today's entry from Filmology is The Conformist (1970), Bernardo Bertolucci's extravagantly creepy psychological thriller about Marxism, fascism, Freud, and the violent currents of repression and 20th century European authoritarianism.

My book, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to a Complete Film Education, is now for sale in both paperback and ebook formats.

2011-03-11T06:52:00.001-05:00

New in Theaters:

Elektra Luxx

Things start promisingly in writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez's comedy Elektra Luxx, in which self-important "sex blogger" Bert Rodriguez (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, thoroughly in on the joke) pontificates to his web audience about the apparently gargantuan sociopolitical import of the titular adult-film star. Bert lectures on Elektra Luxx's oeuvre in an earnestly puffed-up manner, as serious as any film-studies major discussing the impact of the French New Wave, deflated only by the arrival of his annoying, exhibitionist little sister, and the bellows of his mother to take out the trash...

Elektra Luxx opens today in pretty limited release. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

2011-03-07T07:04:00.000-05:00

New in Books:

Swamplandia!

As untrustworthy narrators go, the alligator-wrestling 12-year-old Ava Bigtree is one of modern fiction’s finest. While not a purposeful liar per se, she retains the dubious fact-from-fiction separating abilities of any child her age. This is a point that becomes more perplexing the deeper one plunges into the depths of Karen Russell’s wonderfully overstuffed, scaldingly funny, and frightening debut novel...

Swamplandia! is on sale everywhere. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

2011-03-03T17:33:00.000-05:00

New in Theaters:

The Adjustment Bureau

A quasi-theological chase flick that nearly transforms into a full-blown romance, Bourne Ultimatum scribe George Nolfi's writing/directing debut bucks the trend of Philip K. Dick film adaptations by not emphasizing the brain-snapping paranoia of his work. Instead, Nolfi takes an approach that's both lighter in tone and yet more substantive in its core story than mind games like Minority Report and Total Recall. There's little in the way of dark shadows or bloodshed, but at the same time, the entire world is at stake...

The Adjustment Bureau opens wide tomorrow. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-03-01T07:47:00.000-05:00

New in Books:

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth

The twisting tug of alternate strategies for dealing with the not-so-slow motion catastrophe that seems ready to engulf human civilization is one that threads through Mark Hertsgaard’s lively, surprisingly hopeful treatise but is never quite resolved. That is as it should be, and not just because the proponents of each camp have such potent arguments in their favor. This is also due to the fact that climate change has advanced to such an alarmingly dangerous state that we as a race no longer have the luxury of choosing between strategies – we’re going to have to use all of them, and hope that it will work...

Hot is available now pretty much everywhere. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

2011-02-28T07:30:00.001-05:00

New in Theaters:

Even the Rain

A director shooting a gripping epic about the tyranny of Christopher Columbus gets a lesson in humility in Icíar Bollaín's potent satire about First World humanitarian hubris running up against Third World realities. Though the film as a whole is about as subtle as an anti-imperialist polemic by Howard Zinn -- it's actually dedicated to the late, truculent left-wing historian -- and not without some serious structural flaws, its burning spirit has an unimpeachable potency...

Even the Rain is playing now in limited release and should expand over the next couple of months. Try to seek it out. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-02-25T07:08:00.000-05:00

New in Theaters:

Of Gods and Men

The Psalm that introduces Xavier Beauvois's lacerating elegy doesn't leave much mystery as to where things are headed: "You shall die like men and fall like princes." There is an air of predestination that clouds Of Gods and Men, giving it the feel of some ancient allegory told and retold by scholars throughout the ages...

Of Gods and Men opens today in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

2011-02-21T08:27:00.001-05:00

Filmology:
February 21st

"If they move, kill 'em!"

Today's entry from Filmology is The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah's absurdly war-like elegy for the end of the Old West and for a time when bad guys could just head down Mexico-way whenever things got dicey.

My book, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to a Complete Film Education, is now for sale in both paperback and ebook formats.

2011-02-18T07:02:00.002-05:00

New in Theaters:

Unknown

For all the skittery flashbacks and paranoid atmospherics, there isn’t much to Unknown in the final reckoning—and this isn’t a bad thing. At least it doesn’t dig into the seeming metaphysical mystery suggested in early scenes, and its schematic screenplay, doesn’t quite abandon its more interesting questions, concerning identity and purpose. But a couple car chases and furniture-breaking fights later, the fact that Unknown is a Joel Silver production is increasingly apparent. Again, this is not the worst thing...

Unknown opens in wide release today. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

2011-02-11T07:33:00.000-05:00

New in Books:

Occupied City

In 1948, in occupied Tokyo, a man walked into a branch of the Teikoku Bank and informed the workers present that he was a public health official there to inoculate them against an outbreak of dysentery. He dispensed a series of two liquid medicines to each of the 16 workers in attendance. Very soon after, the bank employees collapsed in writhing agony. The man gathered up some (but not all) the cash laying out on the desks and escaped. Twelve people died, and while a murderer was imprisoned, many believe that justice was never really done...

David Peace's 2009 novel Occupied City has just been released in paperback, check it out. The full review is at PopMatters.

2011-02-10T06:56:00.001-05:00

In Theaters:

Poetry

Lee Chang-dong’s perceptive drama Poetry, about a woman facing the onset of Alzheimer’s as well as a torrid family crisis, is keenly acted but meandering....

Poetry opens in limited release tomorrow. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

2011-02-08T07:48:00.000-05:00

Filmology:
February 8th

"Hope always dies last."

Today's entry from Filmology is The Lives of Others (2007), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's brilliantly paranoid, thrilling, nerve-jangling investigation of Cold War life in East Germany.

My book, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to a Complete Film Education, is now for sale in both paperback and ebook formats.

2011-02-07T08:36:00.001-05:00

New in Books:

Prophets of War

A book could have been made from the story of a single fighter plane alone. William D. Hartung’s Lockheed Martin exposé starts with a sharp and concise reckoning of how the company made the full-court press in order to keep its problematic F-22 Raptor fighter program alive. It’s a thrilling piece of journalism, combining deep background knowledge of the program’s particulars with a keen grasp of the political machinations that swirled around its long undeath...

Prophets of War is on sale now. You can read the full review at PopMatters.