Bless Me, Ultima
Ultima Fighting: Adaptation of best-selling Chicano novel Bless Me, Ultima appeals with honesty, morality.
The independent film Bless Me, Ultima is based on the most widely read and best-selling novel of the Chicano literary canon, according to the film’s press kit. Written by Rudolfo Anaya and published in 1972, ...
Hitchcock
Hitch in the Story: Hitchcock portrays famed director as more conflicted and less perverse than history reveals.
Alfred Hitchcock, the undisputed master of movie suspense, is given fairly fanciful treatment in this movie, which is theoretically based on Stephen Rebello’s book, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. Yet, as written by ...
Trouble With the Curve
Bunt Single: Trouble With the Curve makes a decent pitch, but nothing all-world.
This ode to old-school baseball scouting arrives almost as though in response to last year’s Moneyball. Trouble With the Curve, this autumn’s boys-of-summer movie, is a testament to the traditional methods of analyzing a player’s ...
A Dog of a Story: Darling Companion takes the boring travails of rich people to the dullest of lows.
Dogs and spouses: Both make fine companions until they misbehave or run away. Lawrence Kasdan, the filmmaker who so well encapsulated generational preoccupations in The Big Chill and Grand Canyon, tries to do the same ...
Footnote
Talmud Tale: Father and son academics engage in rivalry of Biblical proportions in Footnote.
The usual strife between fathers and sons charts an uncommon course through academia in this laceratingly comic and award-winning Israeli film. The Shkolnik men – father Eliezer (Shlomo Bar Aba) and son Uriel (Loir Ashkenazi) ...
The Kid With a Bike
Simply Beautiful: The Dardenne brothers use simplicity and the mundane as tools of transcendence in The Kid With a Bike.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, The Kid With a Bike is indeed a towering achievement, perhaps all the more so because of its deceptive simplicity. This latest film ...
Pariah
Coming Out On Top: Pariah refuses to conform in its telling of a closeted lesbian’s trials of self-discovery.
Pariah encompasses the personal and the universal with its emotionally engaging story about a Brooklyn teenager who struggles to find a place to fit in and thrive. The film is fresh yet familiar, raw but ...
My Week With Marilyn
The Goddess Effect: Michelle Williams conjures immortality, but My Week With Marilyn fails to charm.
Colin Clark was 23 years old when the most famous movie star in the world, Marilyn Monroe, came to England to co-star with acting legend Sir Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl, which ...
The Ides of March
George Clooney-led ensemble cast in The Ides of March is an intern romance away from landslide success.
The perfectly captured gray slush of Ohio in winter provides a suitable backdrop for George Clooney’s morality tale about politics in America. Clooney’s fourth directorial outing calls to mind ’70s political thrillers such as The ...
Bloody Aliens
England’s Attack the Block moves the extraterrestrial attack flick to a fresh and clever new ’hood: the projects.
Smart, quick, funny, and economical, Attack the Block is an alien-invasion movie that is a breed apart. Set largely within a London housing project, the film turns on the idea that its young hoodlum protagonists ...
Another Earth
Parallel Pooper: Another Earth fails to make it out of its own sci-fi field of gravity.
Shaky science fiction shacks up with a corny redemption tale in this Sundance Film Festival double award-winner. What emerges is a film with a potent signature image, a swirl of half-baked ideas about the possibility ...
Sarah’s Key
Sad Truth: Sarah’s Key turns audiences on to arresting characters persevering through onerous but dramatically different obstacles.
Two parallel stories from different eras intertwine and inform each other in Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s film, which is based on Tatiana de Rosnay’s best-selling novel. The structure is a delicate balancing act, since one story is ...
Hesher
Strong performances from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Rainn Wilson undone by nonsense.
Hesher, the nihilistic character played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is the antidote for what ails this movie’s dysfunctional family. The character is designed to be pure id – a snarling, half-dressed squatter bearing ominous tattoos on ...
Jane Eyre
The latest Jane Eyre is just a little more passion away from being super powerful.
Jane Eyre, one of cinema’s most frequently filmed novels, is once again on our screens in a handsomely mounted new version. That Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic novel, which was published in 1847, has seen so many ...
Rabbit Hole
Sad But True: Rabbit Hole rides inspired performances (including Nicole Kidman’s) to powerful effect.
Although it is achingly sad, Rabbit Hole is not maudlin or depressing. Adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire from his play, the film ushers us into the lives of Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie Corbett (Aaron Eckhart), ...
Gulliver's Travels
Black Out: Gulliver’s Travels doesn’t go much of anywhere.
As disinterested in itself as Gulliver’s Travels seems to be, it’s a wonder it ever came into existence at all. The film reveals little exertion made on behalf of the narrative, lackadaisical attention paid to ...
Little Fockers
Dumb Fockers: Little Fockers doesn’t make the most of its opportunities.
Apart from the smutty giggles that derive from the mere mention of the Focker family surname, this third entry in the now 10-year-old comedy franchise falls flat. Following Meet the Parents in 2000 and Meet ...
Cairo Time
An ode to a city, as well as a passion.
Juliette (Patricia Clarkson), a busy magazine editor, has taken a break in her schedule to travel to Cairo to visit her husband, Mark (Tom McCamus), who is a United Nations official working in Gaza. When ...
Winter’s Bone
Speed Kills: Cutting to the Winter’s Bone
“Never ask for what ought to be offered,” 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) admonishes her younger brother and sister. Despite their hunger and destitution, the Dolly clan will know the difference between right and wrong ...
Cyrus
Baby Love:
With Cyrus, the transition of the Duplass brothers (Jay and Mark) from their germinal Austin filmmaking roots into full-blown Hollywood filmmakers is complete – even though their new comedy will not be mistaken for any ...
Vincere
Springtime for Benito: Artful Marco Bellocchio biopic tells the hidden history of Mussolini’s first wife.
The long-scuttled tragic story of the lives of Ida Dalser, the first wife of Benito Mussolini, and their child, Benito Albino (Mussolini’s first-born), is brought to the screen with arresting style by Italian director Marco ...
Chloe
Stinky Kinky: Chloe excels at scintillation, fails as filmmaking.
Director Atom Egoyan has lost his mojo and no matter what he does, he can’t seem to reclaim it. His latest film, Chloe, leaves little room for the benefit of doubt or the good will ...
A Prophet
Crime Story:
The astonishingly good French drama, A Prophet, is the best prison/crime saga to come along in quite a while – and that’s not just because the film can boast fistfuls of awards (among them, numerous ...
Coco Before Chanel
French Dip: Coco Before Chanel provides a look into the back story of a fashion icon.
Before her name became synonymous with French couture, perfumes, and other luxury goods, Gabrielle Chanel was a girl of few synonyms. By the age of 12, she was a motherless child who was then raised ...
The Informant!
Anyone Can Whistle: The Informant! tells us more about human nature than corporate wrongdoing.
Although they share the same first syllable and both are movies about real-life corporate whistle-blowers, Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! could not be more different than Michael Mann’s The Insider, a dramatic thriller about a scientist/executive ...
Adoration
Family Matters: Atom Egoyan continues to make provocative, if elusive, explorations.
Atom Egoyan’s latest, Adoration, marks the great Canadian filmmaker’s return to the kind of intimate drama he strayed from with his last couple of efforts (the history-rectifying meditation on the Armenian genocide, Ararat, and the ...
The Class
Class Title: An unsentimental education in a French drama.
The gulf that sometimes emerges between meaning well and doing well is just one of the sharply observed human experiences illuminated in this French classroom drama. When the best-laid lesson plans fail, liberal-minded teachers faced ...
When Did You Last See Your Father?
Father Hood: When Did You Last See Your Father? looks at a strained familial relationship.
Based on the British poet Blake Morrison’s written memoir, the film When Did You Last See Your Father? is a very particular yet universal story about the eternal knot between fathers and sons. Told from ...
Serious Chills
The Mist somehow manages to be a thought-provoking B movie.
My mother, who was a young girl during World War II, is still haunted by something her father said to her during those years. In a boomerang attempt to silence any worries she might have, ...
Ladies’ Man
Ladies’ Man
Despite a title that makes this movie sound as though it might be the latest madcap offering from Pedro Almodóvar, In the Land of Women is a much more conventional affair—a tame yet appealing melodrama ...
True Crime
Zodiac is a meticulously researched look at Northern California’s most notorious serial killer.
David Fincher, the director of Se7en, Fight Club, and Panic Room, switches gears with his new film Zodiac from psychological thrillers to something that more closely resembles a police procedural. Based on Robert Graysmith’s two ...
A Grown-Up’s Fairy Tale
Pan’s Labyrinth is a daring work of startling imagination.
When fascism is the rule of the land, the only choices for its citizens are submission or covert resistance. For a child—a being who, by definition, is powerless and whose socialization requires some amount of ...
Dark Horse
Dark Horse
Part concert film and part biography, Lian Lunson’s Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man is a moving tribute to this legendary artist’s life and career. Moreover, the film salutes four decades of Cohen’s songwriting output, a ...
Mind Games
A new documentary makes the world of crossword puzzle players look fascinating.
Although he’s now an award-winning television star, Jon Stewart has not fared quite as well with his movie career, which has generally veered toward terrible choices and flat performances. So, it’s a delight to see ...
Home On the Range
In director Ang Lee’s beautiful Brokeback Mountain, two cowboys became enamored with one another during a summer in Wyoming.
Enough with the “gay cowboy” label. The term is more or less accurate, I suppose, but the phrase has a way of diminishing this amazing movie’s focus and reach. Brokeback Mountain is a love story ...
High Wattage
The only good thing about Ellie Parker is Naomi Watts’ sensational performance.
After spending nearly a year on the top-flight festival circuit, it’s probably not coincidental that this Naomi Watts performance showcase has just recently been slipping into theatres that are presently readying themselves for the onslaught ...
The Good Fight
George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck details the battle between newsman Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Director and co-screenwriter George Clooney strikes just the right tone in this screen story of TV newsman Edward R. Murrow’s courageous battle in the ‘50s against the Commie-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose bullying and deceitful ...
Window Dressing
El Crimen Perfecto is not much more than nice to look at.
This crazy black comedy, which is set mostly in a Madrid department store, is fun without ever becoming truly hilarious. Rafael (Guillermo Toledo) is the manager of the women’s clothing department, and he’s in mortal ...
New Directions
With
Filmmaker Gregg Araki, heretofore best known for his numerous ragged and nihilistic coming-of-age, gay melodramas, here crosses over from the fringes to make his most mature and penetrating drama to date. Although he’s still transgressive ...
Young Love
Young Love
Mona (Nathalie Press) rides a motorbike without a motor. Tamsin (Emily Blunt) initially comes into view on the back of a horse. It’s summertime in the Yorkshire countryside when these two bored teenage girls first ...
Head of the Class
Rock School examines rocker turned teacher Paul Green.
If one were looking to open a rock school of one’s own, there would be very little practical or instructive information in this film to guide one’s efforts. For this is not just any rock ...
Trading Places
The Danish film Brothers shows the effects of war on one member of a family.
Like her previous film, Open Hearts, Brothers is a psychological drama minus the psychology, and is based on a story idea by Danish director Susanne Bier and a screenplay by Anders Thomas Jensen. Both films ...
Meet the Parent
Rebecca Miller, daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, examines a strange family dynamic in The Ballad of Jack and Rose.
Director Rebecca Miller’s evocative drama about an insular father-daughter relationship raids mightily from the closets of Freud and narrative symbolism to tell this story in which not very much happens in terms of outward events ...
How Helen Got Her Groove Back
How Helen Got Her Groove Back
Like Stella a few years ago, this new movie tells the story of how yet another black woman, Helen McCarter (Kimberly Elise), jumps back in the game and gets her groove back. The characters’ journeys ...
Advanced Shakespeare
Al Pacino as Shylock helps bring Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to the big screen.
William Shakespeare’s thorniest play arrives in this new film format with most of its prickliness still intact. The poetry of Shakespeare’s language is given the freedom to soar by director Michael Radford (Il Postino), and ...
Middle-Aged Splendor
Annette Bening plays a diva of the stage in Being Julia.
There are so few really great film roles written for middle-aged women that when one comes along and it’s delivered forth in such spectacular fashion by the near-perfect Annette Bening, it’s disappointing to have to ...
Movie Rewind
Top 10 Movies of 2004 and a Handful of Other Awards.
1. THE AVIATORAll right, already: Give Scorsese every award he’s due. In Howard Hughes he has found his great Kane, and who knows when he’ll strike oil again. 2. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND ...
Meet the Sequel
Potty humor is abundant in this follow-up to the 2000 movie Meet the Parents.
You can Fockerize Meet the Parents all you want, but this new movie is nothing more than a lame sequel to the comic hit of 2000. Added to this new mix is merely another set ...
Industrial Mystery
Director Wes Anderson excels at haunted atmosphere with The Machinist.
Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) looks like hell. His gaunt frame, sunken eyes, and deathly pallor make him look like a survivor just released from a concentration camp. With his skeletal bones and vertebrae jutting out ...
West End Theatrics
Being Julia’s leading lady controls the stage—and life—from all sides.
There are so few really great film roles written for middle-aged women that when one comes along and it’s delivered in such spectacular fashion by the near-perfect Annette Bening, it’s disappointing to have to note ...
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