Celeste & Jesse Forever
Hot Pain: Best friends divorce in a Celeste & Jesse Forever story that finds charm wrapped in deep discomfort.
When women have meltdowns in the movies, the meltdowns rarely overstay their welcome. A box of tissues dispatched, a Ben & Jerry’s gorge, maybe a bottle of wine (but never more than one). “Keep it ...
To Rome With Love
Spaghetti Told Western: Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love roams aimlessly through the ancient city.
The original, more euphonious title for Woody Allen’s 42nd feature film was The Bop Decameron, but Allen changed course, he told an interviewer, when he realized the illiterate masses (I paraphrase) didn’t have a clue ...
Pina
Wim Wenders sets bodies to motion in celebration of famed dancer Pina Bausch.
At the time of her death in 2009, the German-born Pina Bausch was one of the most celebrated dancer/choreographers of her time – or any time. You won’t find that kind of biographical detail in ...
One Day
Time Warped: One Day struggles to fully capitalize on a clever concept – or does it?
Following the same template as the ingratiating source novel by David Nicholls (who also wrote the screenplay), One Day charts 20 years of a relationship’s ups and downs in one-day blips. Touching down on the ...
Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
Hip-Hop History: Beats Rhymes & Life tracks the rise of Tribe Called Quest.
Actor turned first-time documentarian Michael Rapaport mostly keeps himself off camera in this admiring portrait of the seminal ’90s hip-hop outfit A Tribe Called Quest. But his voice – an upper-register whine that pitches even ...
Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is powerfully and beautifully bewildering.
After 2008’s conventionally plotted, over-praised The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky dives back into another competitive sport of sorts in the deliciously wackadoodle Black Swan. This drama-horror hybrid, set within a New York ballet company, strikes a ...
Never Let Me Go
Loose Grip: Never Let Me Go doesn’t seize its tremendous potential completely.
Early reaction to this filmed adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s undeniably under-the-skin (but a mite overpraised) Never Let Me Go seemed to share a same basic – very American, I think – complaint. (You should stop ...
Flipped
Rob Reiner revisits familiar coming of age territory in charming, if predictable, new flick.
That Flipped works at all is no small wonder, and if that sounds like a backhanded compliment, you’re right on the money. So is this: It’s Rob Reiner’s best film in a decade… but just ...
The Girl Who Played With Fire
Tattoo You: Second film adaptation of best-selling crime series is heavy on atmosphere, light on excitement.
“Played with fire” may be misleading, playfulness not being one of the leading characteristics of Lisbeth Salander, the black-leathered, dragon-tatted, hog-riding hacker – bisexual, to boot! – who has, almost improbably, beguiled an international legion ...
Greenberg
L.A. Story: Ben Stiller plays it straight in seriously told, dramatically successful tale of a losing loner.
Noah Baumbach’s very vocal critics have sneered that with Greenberg, the 40-year-old writer/director has made his first mumblecore movie, the lo-fi, DIY movement Baumbach has dabbled in recently (he produced Joe Swanberg’s Alexander the Last ...
Remember Me
The Dead Zone:
NYU students Ally Craig (Emilie de Ravin) and Tyler Hawkins (Robert Pattinson) have a lot in common: a shared philosophy class, overbearing fathers, dead relatives. Ally’s mother was murdered in front of her at a ...
The Last Station
War and Piece: Drama about Tolstoy’s troubled marriage is a surprisingly lusty portrait of literary life.
“Practice what you preach” is a saying that has undone many an ideologue, and Leo Tolstoy, one of the world’s great writers and thinkers, struggled with his own appetites, which ran counter to a publicly ...
The Young Victoria
Eminent Victoria: Latest bio-pic of Princess Victoria getting busy before ascending to the throne is a little staid, but has its moments.
How young is young Victoria? At the film’s beginning, she’s just 17, with all the sullenness you would expect from a shut-in future queen fending off attack from her mama and prospective suitors cherry-picked by ...
New York, I Love You
Off-key Love Song: Eclectic Manhattan film ode overreaches – despite an eclectic group of directors and a talented cast.
The central thesis in this omnibus of short films (spun off from Emmanuel Benbihy and Tristan Carné’s compilation film Paris, Je T’aime) seems to be that New York is not its landmarks or its landscape; ...
Moon
Angel Baby: Moon is an inventive exploration of inner and outer space.
Any cinematic space odyssey of the past 40 years surely owes a debt to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; Moon’s most obvious debt is the strategic use of a computer that has a cozy name ...
Revolutionary Road
Domestic Warfare: Titanic co-stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio reunite in a movie about a sinking marriage.
I suppose you could call Revolutionary Road a movie about the killing effects of the suburbs – something director Sam Mendes previously explored in his debut film American Beauty. But that’d be a facile reduction ...
Brideshead Revisited
Estate Tax: In this new version of Brideshead Revisited, times takes its toll on the film’s two protagonists.
I’m not sure that Evelyn Waugh, a Roman Catholic convert, would have endorsed this accomplished adaptation of his 1945 novel about the pre-World War II chasmic divides of class and religion and one man’s efforts ...
Sex and the City: The Movie
The well-dressed characters of Sex and the City: The Movie appear lovely on the big screen.
Surely enough ink has been spilled over whether a women’s picture can own the weekend box office, or if Carrie and company can find a crossover audience. Still, it raises the hackles: You can’t really ...
Son of Rambow
Action Refigured: A couple British kids attempt to make their own sequel to Sylvester Stallone’s First Blood in Son of Rambow.
Acongregant of a strict (and unspecified) religious sect in the early ’80s, young Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is a runty innocent mourning the sudden death of his father. His only solace lies in the outpourings ...
Word Weary
Word Weary
Myla Goldberg’s novel about spelling-bee fever, a family in chaos, and religious/mystic exploration arrives on the screen with all its faults intact, but few of its charms. This is second-rate Hallström, drama plus whimsy that, ...
Quite a Catch
Noah Baumbach’s exceptional The Squid and the Whale examines a dysfunctional New York family.
The opening line lays it all out on the table: “It’s Mom and me versus you and Dad.” Young Frank (Owen Kline) is merely delineating sides for a family game of tennis, but when that ...
Fighting to Die
In the Oscar winning
Among the obvious list of things that make moviegoers feel good— bunnies, puppies, and children with slight lisps all spring to mind—euthanasia typically would not make the cut. But that is indeed the sleight of ...
Chinese director creates fast-paced love story/swashbuckler.
Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s second martial arts epic in two years, House of Flying Daggers, doesn’t have the grave import, the awesome stoicism of Hero, but I think that makes for a more entertaining picture. ...
Strange Seas
Director Wes Anderson takes his latest comedy/drama out to sea.
Even Wes Anderson’s most ardent fans—and I count myself one of them—might scratch their heads at his latest picture, wondering just how to process this fantastical tale of the Jacques Cousteau-like oceanographer, Steve Zissou (Murray), ...
Dark Days
Jim Carrey is the best and worst part of the film adaptation of Daniel Handler’s Lemony Snicket books.
“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off watching some other movie,” warns our narrator, Lemony Snicket. “In this movie,” he continues gravely, “not only is there no happy ...
Heart On Its Sleeve
David O. Russell’s new I Heart Huckabees shows the zany, yet soft, side of corporate politics.
This long-awaited new film from David O. Russell is billed as an “existential comedy;” I’d argue it’s his second comedy of this sort, after 1996’s terrific Flirting With Disaster, which charted one man’s search for ...
On The Couch
French woman mistakenly spills her problems to a tax attorney in an edgy romance.
This modest French-language film follows the time-honored cinematic tradition of plot as spearheaded by a simple twist of fate. Case in point: Had Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) gone six doors down to the left, as instructed, ...
Man of Mystery
Former assassin Jason Bourne is still on the run from the Russians and the CIA.
If amnesia victim/former CIA killing machine Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) were a demonstrative man, then some Corleone-style grandstanding—“just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”—would have been well within his rights. ...
May-December Love
May-December Love
Sirk and Fassbinder, most famously, tackled the social stigma of a middle-aged woman reigniting her sex life with a younger man, but director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) and writer Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette) raise ...
Anything Goes
The big screen life of Jazz Age songwriter Cole Porter dances along, with little drama.
Irwin Winkler’s kid-gloves adaptation of the lives of Cole Porter and his wife Linda, De-Lovely, begins with Porter (Kevin Kline) at the piano, dying or possibly already dead, interrupted by a ghost/Broadway producer (Jonathan Pryce), ...
Really Big Macs
One man’s 30-day trip through McDonalds’ menu.
Here’s but a small sampling from the reams of alarming statistics served up in Morgan Spurlock’s incendiary documentary about our fast food nation: Every day, one in four Americans visits a fast food restaurant. Obesity ...
Unusually dramatic Kevin Smith film doesn’t have his trademark “bite.”
Within their modest, audience-specific ambitions, films like Clerks and Mallrats were gleefuly trashy good fun, and even when director Kevin Smith stretched beyond straight comedy, as in Chasing Amy, he never strayed from his chief ...
Odd casting choices mar an otherwise beautiful Human Stain.
Photo: Only Human: Faunia (Nicole Kidman) consoles her lover, Coleman (Anthony Hopkins), in the movie adaptation of Philip Roth''s novel. Somewhat near the end of this adaptation of the 1998 Philip Roth novel, a woman ...
Unemployed Spanish barflies ponder the injustices of life in the award-winning Los Lunes al Sol.
Photo: Javier Bardem leads a stellar ensemble cast through the witty Mondays in the Sun. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday, Friday...it hardly matters which day is which to the layabouts and functional drunks of this multiple ...
Alan Rudolph's new drama examines the cavities and decay of a married couple's life, and the fantasies that come between them.
Photo: Open Wide: Campbell Scott and Hope Davis struggle through infidelity in The Secret Lives of Dentists. Dentistry doesn''t really have anything to do with the secret lives on display in Alan Rudolph''s domestic drama, ...
What's worse than an unfunny French comedy--Jacques Chirac?
Adapted from Diane Johnson''s breezy 1998 bestseller of the same name, Le Divorce comes from Team Merchant Ivory, the filmmaking trio --American director James Ivory, Indian producer Ismail Merchant, and German screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala--responsible ...
Middle class Brits fall for landowner Americans in romantic I Capture the Castle.
"I am never going to fall in love. Life is dangerous enough," declares Cassandra (Romola Garais), the unusually grave narrator of I Capture the Castle, a BBC co-production based on the 1946 novel by Dodie ...
Seabiscuit the horse carries Seabiscuit the movie to the finish line.
Photo: Seabiscuit ("Fighting Furrarri") struts his stuff for jockey Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire). Adapted from the bestselling nonfiction work by Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit dramatizes the story of three men--owner Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges), jockey Red ...
How To Deal treats teenagers with more respect than most films.
How to Deal''s title suggests a solution, a clean course of action, when in fact the most refreshing thing about this teen dramedy is its willingness to embrace, even celebrate, the messiness of young adulthood. ...
New Danny Boyle film scares your bloody socks off.
Photo: Vomit Vampires: Survivors of a mass epidemic try to make their way to Manchester and safety. Filmed before SARS hit, the eerily prescient 28 Days Later holds fast to the tropes of horror but ...
Frances McDormand has a great character but little to do in this almost-great film.
Photo: Rockin Mama: Frances McDormand lets loose as fast-living Jane in Laurel Canyon. In the promotional push for Laurel Canyon a couple of months ago, it seemed like Frances McDormand was everywhere, with features in ...
Buried treasure, kid convicts and a curse that follows the generations--yeah, a comedy.
Photo: Who''s In Charge: Jon Voight, Sigourney Weaver and Tim Black Nelson are the wierdos in charge of Camp Green Lake. One way to make sure those Hollywood types don''t foul up the movie based ...
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner help make Daredevil one of the best-looking movies out there.
Photo: Bodies In Motion: Ben and Jennifer fight crime and melt hearts. As rendered on film, Bruce Wayne and Vicki Vale left me cold. Peter Parker and Mary Jane played like a squeaky adolescent pop ...
25th Hour marks Spike Lee as New York City's filmmaker laureate.
Photo: Dealer''s Decision: Edward Norton ponders whether to go to jail, or live life on the run. As Woody Allen slides perilously close to irrelevance, Spike Lee has emerged as the quintessential New York filmmaker, ...
Sweet Home Alabama invites true love into the rags-to-riches story.
Photo: Sew Sew--Reese Witherspoon is a poor Southern girl who finds love and glamor as a big-city designer in the mostly entertaining Sweet Home Alabama. Sweet Home Alabama hooks itself on the idea of geographical ...
In Blue Crush, women surfers finally get their turn in the lineup.
Photo: No Wimpy Wahines-Kate Bosworth carves up Pipeline in Blue Crush. Same sport (surfing), same locale (Hawaii), same gender and attire (girls in bikinis). That''s about as close to Gidget as Blue Crush ever gets. ...
Austin Powers in Goldmember recycles jokes and reverts to potty humor, but it's funny anyway.
Photo: Drives You Wild, Baby-against all odds, Mike Myers pulls it off one more time in Austin Powers in Goldmember. Like a patient too long under laughing gas, the latest installment in the Austin Powers ...
Despite a few good gags, Hollywood Ending ultimately falls flat.
After 30-odd films, a director probably deserves the occasional freebie. The mostly applauding press seems to agree, as does the admission board at Cannes, who''ve awarded Hollywood Ending its opening night berth. Woody Allen, too, ...
Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie exposes a charming, romantic Paris.
An unseen narrator rattles off lists of the likes and dislikes of the characters in Amelie: a writer in a restaurant likes to watch bullfighters gored on television, Mme. Poulain dislikes her fingers pruning up ...
Breasts and bombs: Swordfish has everything an adolescent male could desire.
It''s difficult to synopsize Swordfish, to whittle it down to a digestible nugget. The film (directed by Gone in 60 Seconds'' Dominic Sena) is a mish-mash of cops and robbers, broken-family sob stories, and cyber ...
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