A labor of love from Tarsem Singh (who often prefers to go by just "Tarsem"), the musical video director who made his feature debut with 2000's "The Cell," "The Fall" was paid for out of pocket by the filmmaker and shot over the course of four years. The film, about a movie stuntman (played by "Pushing Daisies"' Lee Pace) who narrates a fantastical story to the five-year-old girl with whom he's in the hospital, is certainly visually striking, but reviews are mixed as to how well it all actually comes together. "[L]acking the ability to fashion cohesive tales driven by engaging characters, Singh overcompensates with his trademark visual palette and loses a hold on both in the process," sighs Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "If the human details are often problematic, the IMAX-grade bombast, ceremonial camera, and Jodorowsky-esque eclecticism still combine for a singular spectacle," counters Nick Pinkerton at the Village Voice.

At the New York Times, Nathan Lee describes "The Fall" as "a real bore" and wonders at the way the girl is "cognizant, it would seem, of the full repertory of high-gloss, empty-headed pictorialism deployed by corporate advertising." Tasha Robinson at the Onion AV Club admits the film "is pretentious to the point of laughability," but finds "the structure is so delicate, the ideas are so ambitious, and the imagery is so hellishly flamboyant that it's easy to fall into Tarsem's over-the-top vision... It's the most glorious, wonderful mess put onscreen since Terry Gilliam's Brazil." Slant's Ed Gonzalez believes the film to be insufferably self-indulgent: "Shunning logic and compassion, The Fall is a bedtime story impeccably designed to flatter its own maker." Armond White at the New York Press writes that "Tarsem has that David Fincher problem of creating TV-flimsy imagery that lacks the spatial and emotional weight of true cinema. In the final sequence, Tarsem connects Alexandria and Roy's wishfulness to silent film heritage and the mass audience experience. Yet The Fall remains remote and unengaging." But Glenn Kenny at Premiere disagrees, finding that it "works like crazy as a multi-leveled, smart, jaw-droppingly beautiful, big-hearted piece of entertainment... I can't quite bring myself to call it visionary. But it'll more than do until the genuinely visionary comes along, as that doesn't happen too often, especially these days."

[Photo: "The Fall," Roadside Attractions, 2006]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Lee Pace, Tarsem Singh, The Fall

Documentarian provocateur Nick Broomfield, of "Biggie and Tupac" and "Kurt & Courtney," goes semi-scripted in "Battle for Haditha," which portrays a real and ugly incident involving 24 Iraqi men, women and children, all civilians, who were killed by a group of United States Marines, possibly in retaliation for the earlier death of one of their own. Broomfield uses non-professional actors, many former military, in his film, which begs comparison to Brian De Palma's "Redacted" but is certainly getting a better reception from the critics. Certainly most see it as more balanced — New York's David Edelstein compares it to the multi-POV "The Wire," concluding that "even when the dialogue is stilted, the acting and directing take the starch out of it. Battle for Haditha has some of the raw energy of Sam Fuller's war pictures, which weren't subtle but left you energized by their ambivalence (there was no good or evil). It's a hell of a picture." "'Battle for Haditha' is a relentlessly exciting war film, unafflicted by moralism or finger-pointing, that leaves all the judgment to us, adds Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Which only makes it harder to bear."

For Armond White at the New York Press, the film's "greatest breakthrough comes from Broomfield unabashedly portraying al-Qaeda characters while the rest of Hollywood fears facing this reality--as if following the Muslim prohibition against portraying Mohammad... This taboo-busting is an act of humane imagination; that's what's missing from one-way Iraq War films that condescend or propagandize." Leo Goldsmith at indieWIRE finds that "it is the event itself -- and not how it is reported or misrepresented -- that fascinates Broomfield, and this is what distinguishes his film." Though he thinks that it "sometimes feels like an amateur remake of Jarhead," Nathan Rabin at the Onion AV Club declares that the film "ultimately derives much of its primal power from its bluntness and simplicity."

Others have quibbles: Anthony Kaufman at the Village Voice acknowledges that "[w]hen the shit finally hits the fan, though, the results are more emotionally bruising than many of Haditha's predecessors... Then again, the film's affective power occasionally bubbles over into the manipulative." And Manohla Dargis at the New York Times writes that the film, "though technically exemplary, falters dramatically on occasion, becoming dangerously close to overheated whenever the characters speak for any length."

{Photo: "Battle for Haditha," Hanway Films, 2007]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Battle for Haditha, Iraq, Nick Broomfield

"Imagine someone pouring hot, melted Starburst candies into your corneas, and you just begin to approximate the experience of 'Speed Racer.'"
       —Alonso Duralde at MSNBC

"Watching Speed Racer... is comparable to dousing one's eyeballs in a sugary hyper-digitized Skittles soup. It's like being immersed in a kaleidoscopic pop-art LSD nightmare in which one's bounced around a pinball machine and assailed by an onslaught of electric smoke tendrils."
       —Nick Schager at Slant

"But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls?"
       —Anthony Lane at the New Yorker

"The Wachowski brothers...deliver enough cotton-candy-colored cinematic pyrotechnics to send you into sugar shock or strobe-induced seizures."
       —Matt Stevens at E! Online

"Speed Racer spins some people's heads right near off their axis."
       —David Poland at The Hot Blog

"[T]he Wachowski Brothers' follow-up to The Matrix trilogy is, if viewed from one angle, the most headache inducing kid's movie of them all; if viewed from another, it's the most expensive avant-garde film ever made."
       —Glenn Kenny at Premiere

"[The] Speed Racer experience - I just can't bring myself to call this garish tantrum a "movie" - is akin to nothing so much as diving face first into a rainbow-hued bowl of methamphetamine-laced cinematic Jell-O. It's a giddy rush for a moment or two, but the comedown is long and harsh."
       —Marc Savlov at Austin Chronicle

[Photo: "Speed Racer," Warner Bros., 2008]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Speed Racer

Here's my review from Sundance last year. "Son of Rambow," the second film from music video team Hammer & Tongs, whose first was the not so well received "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," is long in coming — it was delayed due to a legal struggle with StudioCanal over use of footage from "Rambo: First Blood." Word is, again, mixed on the way whimsical film about two children shooting their own sequel to Stallone's action film.

Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly sighs that director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith "display plenty of whirligig energy, if not much control or lightness of touch," while Scott Tobias at the Onion AV Club suggest that "make that check out to Wes Anderson, care of Rushmore Academy, with a portion of the residuals due to Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie) and his signature Rube Goldberg setpieces." He finds "the film works better in sequences than as a whole, and suffers from an overly familiar homemade aesthetic." Nick Schager at Slant seconds the Anderson comparison, preferring the first half of the film to the second: "Jennings's interest in dramatizing youthful male bonds of friendship and cinema's function as a unifying medium giving way to sappy clashes and even sappier resolutions." "Son of Rambow turns unfortunately insular and maudlin about the desperate sources of its boyhood outcasts' imaginations," agrees Armond White at the New York Press. "Even when enlisting kids at their school to help out in the remake, the amateur endeavor never becomes wild, subversive or original."

Others are more won over: "[A]t its most likable, Son of Rambow evokes the rush of discovery that turns budding cinephiles into lifers--that delight in finding a film that seems to express or coalesce some inchoate yearning, including a yen to share," writes Jim Ridley at the Village Voice. Dana Stevens at Slate dislikes the ending but still finds that "Son of Rambow bristles with the anarchic energy of late childhood and a genuine respect for the life-changing power of movies--even (or especially) the schlocky ones." Michael Koresky at indieWIRE believes the film "jumps uneasily between gritty and surreal, never quite plumbing the depths of the childhood imagination as winningly as darker though more convincingly fanciful films like 'Heavenly Creatures' or 'The Butcher Boy,'" but likes the way "the writer-director refrains from stargazing, dewy appeals to the 'magic' of cinema, even at the film's effectively emotional denouement." And Manohla Dargis at the New York Times adds that "although the film's visual style feels more borrowed than organic, there's enough truth to Will and Lee's actions -- and to the uninflected, touching performances of the two young leads -- to keep the film humming along, even when Mr. Jennings veers into sentimentality and lets one too many tear drop."

[Photo: "Son of Rambow," Paramount Vantage, 2007]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (2)

Tags: Garth Jennings, Hammer & Tongs, Nick Goldsmith, Son of Rambow

Word is mixed on "Mister Lonely," former indie poster child Harmony Korine's first theatrical release since 1999's "Julien Donkey-Boy." The film, which premiered at Cannes last year, stars Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator who ends up at a remote Scottish colony composed entirely of celebrity impersonators, among them Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) and Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant). In an alternate storyline, Werner Herzog plays a priest presiding over skydiving nuns.

Most critics are just lukewarm,: Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer offers "the faint praise of Mister Lonely as the least offensive of the works in the Korine canon." (He also notes that "David Blaine plays Father Umbrillo's priestly subordinate. Lalid Afkir plays someone called Habid in the credits, and I am not sure if either is a celebrity." Well, Mr. Sarris, the former is, if not famous, at least an Oprah-endorsed world record holder.) "Mister Lonely reveals that the punk abrasiveness of Korine's youth has been replaced by a lyrical self-pity--the apparent upshot of a decade on the skids," adds David Edelstein at New York. "I'm glad he has pulled himself together, but the film is pretty ramshackle."

"Korine's biggest challenge to an already skeptical audience is the movie's sleeve-hearted sincerity," suggests Jim Ridley at the Village Voice, who finds that the film, despite often failing, "yields moments of wonder." The Onion AV Club's Noel Murray agrees, to an extent: "Mister Lonely has its moments of wonder and beauty, but the film is obscure by design, and meant to appeal to those who favor the alternative canon of directing greats."

Less fond: Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly complains that "none of the faux icons comes close to being a character." The New York Press' Armond White is, as is in character, not unsparing with one-time scenster prince Korine, who he calls "a zombie filmmaker" before running madcap in praise of Michael Jackson (particularly "exquisite 'You Are Not Alone") and dwelling on Samantha Morton's "corpulent backside."

More fond: Glenn Kenny at Premiere, who, as other have, finds "Mister Lonely" "Korine's experiment in the extremes of bathos, even as the picture tries to propose itself as a comedy of sorts," concludes that "that this is a picture that's divided against itself in a way that's perhaps too hermetic to be comprehended" and gives it three stars out of four. "[T]here will most likely be those who find his sensibility frustratingly hermetic, morbidly preoccupied with the poetry of compositions and camera movements and archly detached from the emotional currents of the story," seconds A.O. Scott at the New York Times. "And yet 'Mister Lonely,' self-enclosed though it may be, nonetheless demonstrates that Mr. Korine, who showed his ability to shock and repel in earlier films, also has the power to touch, to unsettle and to charm."

[Photo: "Mister Lonely," IFC Films, 2007]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (1)

Tags: Diego Luna, Harmony Korine, Mister Lonely, Samantha Morton

On to another doc in Morgan Spurlock style, this one actually made by Morgan Spurlock. "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" attracted a lot of attention when the Weinstein Company picked it up on the basis of just 15 minutes of footage shown to buyers at Berlin last year, and later because of rumors that Spurlock actually, you know, found bin Laden. Well, he didn't (it was a big ask), and the doc's been generating lukewarm reviews since its premiere at Sundance, and similar ones now that it's receiving a theatrical release.

The major complaint from critics seems to be that the film dumbs down its subject matter to an intolerable degree. "Even though we Americans are, according to Mr. Spurlock, conditioned by 'the media' to regard all Muslims as violent extremists, he discovers that a lot of them are actually quite nice. Also, you may be interested to learn, the Israelis and Palestinians don't get along so well, and there are a lot of problems in Afghanistan," notes A.O. Scott at the New York Times. "Conventional wisdom rules," agrees J. Hoberman at the Village Voice. "Even more so than in Super Size Me--which applied the same tactics, but to more appropriately trivial issues--Where In The World is a conversation-starter for ADD-stricken adolescents who can't bear to think about one thing for too long, or too deeply," writes the Onion AV Club's Tasha Robinson, who does find "[t]here's a lot to like amid Where In The World's bouncy amiability."

Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly, who dismisses the film as a "feeble, once-over-lightly tour of the Middle East," also wonders if Spurlock's approach might be what's actually needed to preach to an audience not already singing in the choir:

Spurlock tells you virtually nothing you didn't already know -- and, what's more, he does it with catchy videogame graphics (Osama boogying to ''U Can't Touch This'') and faux-naive man-on-the-street interviews that make Michael Moore look like Chet Huntley. The movie, in other words, is so glib and shallow and facile it just might work at the box office.

At New York, David Edelstein admits to the film's flaws while thinking along the same lines, and drawing a comparison to Spalding Gray's "Swimming to Cambodia." "Would we listen as intently without the People magazine point of entry?" But Ed Gonzalez at Slant is less forgiving, writing that "Spurlock's aesthetic is opportunistic by design, but what makes the director's pandering to the masses so vulgar, almost sad, is that he obviously knows better."

[Photo: "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?," Weinstein Co, 2008]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (1)

Tags: Morgan Spurlock, Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?

The dark side of the festival circuit? Never quite getting over bouts of mystery festival flu. To take my mind off my persistent, certainly tubercular cough, here's a quick look at some of the finer points from reviews of Ben Stein's fascinatingly loopy creationist doc "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," a film that's attracted most of its controversy due to who hasn't been allowed to see it at advance screenings.

Jeannette Catsoulis at the New York Times calls the film "one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time," adding: "Mixing physical apples and metaphysical oranges at every turn 'Expelled' is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike." Jeffrey Kluger at Time writes that "It's in the film's final third that it runs entirely off the rails as Stein argues that there is a clear line from Darwinism to euthanasia, abortion, eugenics and--wait for it--Nazism." From Nick Schager at Slant:

Court actions against intelligent design curriculums are dismissed via a movie clip of a judge making funny faces and twirling his gavel, and the scientific community's supposed fear of scrutinizing Darwinism is explained via the sight of Dorothy pulling the curtain back on the Wizard of Oz. It's proselytizing Morgan Spurlock-style, replete with a childish animated cartoon and CGI sequence of a cell's inner workings.

And Vadim Rizov at the Village Voice almost finds something to like: "[Intelligent design proponents] protest that they're simply interested in secular alternatives to Darwinian evolution; their scientific opponents, meanwhile, are potential Communists and Nazis. Bizarre and hysterical."

[Photo: "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," Rocky Mountain Pictures, 2008]

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Tags: Ben Stein, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Hou Hsiao-hsien's first film outside of Asia, the luminous "The Flight of the Red Balloon," uses Albert Lamorisse's 1956 children's short "The Red Balloon" as a counterpoint to its scarce story of a frazzled Parisian single mother (Juliette Binoche) navigating personal troubles, a career in puppetry and the raising of her seven-year-old son with the help of the Chinese film student (Song Fang) she's hired as a nanny. My review from Cannes last year (written before the film was acquired by our sister company IFC Films) is here.

I love "The Flight of the Red Balloon," and so do most of the critics, but I feel like the heady words of praise that are being heaped on it merit a word of caution — "Flight"'s a delicate as a soap bubble, with about as weighty a narrative pull. As with most all of Hou's films, it needs patience and, really, to be watched in a theater. Still, as Salon's Andrew O'Hehir wrote from Cannes last year: "Several people walked out of the premiere and I can only assume they were bored by this stuff. I'm not so naive as to think there's a large audience for Hou's films in America (or anywhere else, really). But 'The Flight of the Red Balloon' is not arty or difficult in any way, and I genuinely believe that, in its unassuming fashion, it's a masterpiece."

"In the end what elevates Mr. Hou's films to the sublime -- and this one comes close at times -- are not the stories but their telling," writes Manohla Dargis at the New York Times. David Edelstein at New York find that Hou "uses The Red Balloon as a springboard for his own masterpiece--a distinctively modern and allusive one, yet so tender and plaintive that you understand what Hou is up to on a preconscious level." The Village Voice's J. Hoberman, in a particularly nice review, observes that "Flight of the Red Balloon is explicitly an outsider's movie, full of odd perspectives and founded on dislocation," concluding that the film "is in a class by itself. In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius." Glenn Kenny at Premiere seconds the "genius" designation while adding that "This is a slice of life that implies so much more than what's on its surface, something that today's conventional narrative films are increasingly hard-pressed to even attempt."

Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot commends that way that, despite Binoche's star turn, the film "remains a story of childhood, not with bullies to overcome and rites of passage to traverse, but with the fleetingly beautiful moments caught in a haze of everyday routine." Slant's Nick Schager commends its star: "At once commanding and vulnerable, Binoche is a revelation, dominating space in ways ultimately almost as masterful as her director."

And a few words of dissent (or, at least, of grounding) amidst all this acclaim: Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Chicago Reader deemed "The Flight of the Red Balloon" a "relatively slight but sturdy work," while the Onion AV Club's Scott Tobias writes that the film feels "impeccably slight, as if Hou were resigned to playing a tourist in his own movie," allowing that it "disappoints more in context with his career than as a standalone piece." And for Armond White at the New York Press, the problem with the film is that "Hou lacks the common touch." While he declares that the film "never penetrates child and pop consciousness," he does praise Binoche, who "pinpoints emotion across Hou's undifferentiated compositions."

[Photo: "The Flight of the Red Balloon," IFC Films, 2007]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (3)

Tags: Albert Lamorisse, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Juliette Binoche, The Flight of the Red Balloon

Everyone loves Simon Pegg, but few are willing to extend that sentiment to his new film "Run, Fat Boy, Run," a rom-com about a London slacker (Pegg) who tries to win back the woman (Thandie Newton) he left at the altar by running a marathon, also happens to be David Schwimmer's directorial debut. "I wouldn't believe that Run, Fat Boy, Run was co-written by Simon Pegg (of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) if he weren't up there on the screen in teeny briefs and with his gut stuck out, trying to endear himself to the American audience in material maybe a notch above Rob Schneider's," sighs David Edelstein at New York. Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly is reminded of another highbrow comedian, calling the script one "Adam Sandler wouldn't have pulled out of his bottom drawer." At Slant, Nick Schager complains that "Run, Fatboy, Run so slavishly hews to a familiar rom-com template that it quickly makes itself irrelevant, its few idiosyncratic particulars unable to prevent everything from feeling like the same-old tripe with a cute Brit accent." "The forthcoming comedic overhaul signified by Pegg's involvement given past outings in genre spoofs "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz" never arrives; you can only scratch your head, wishing the actor would bring self-awareness to his rom-com confines with a wink and a nudge," writes Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE, while Nathan Rabin at the Onion AV Club finds "There's bittersweet humor in watching Pegg struggle to become the man he and his family need him to be, but this is still the sort of formulaic, high-concept fare it's easy to imagine [screenwriter Michael Ian] Black dryly lampooning in his capacity as VH1's in-house smartass."

There are a few tentative bits of praise, though, mostly Pegg-centric: Jim Ridley at the Village Voice declares that "Pegg has staked out a peculiar slant on genre material that ventures beyond irony toward rehabilitation--and nobody plays blithe humiliation with more style." At the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz writes that "'Run, Fat Boy, Run' is the kind of movie that's apt to be dismissed a goofy lark. It is that. But it's also a rare comedy that believes in its own message, and that could inspire the depressed and the demoralized to grit their teeth and keep running." And the short shorts redeem the film for Salon's Stephanie Zacharek: "The sight of Pegg in those very small smalls is one of the best visuals in 'Run Fatboy Run,' and it's not the only time he seems to be carrying the picture on his sturdy, if not brawny, shoulders."

[Photo: "Run, Fat Boy, Run," New Line Cinema, 2007]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (2)

Tags: Run Fat Boy Run, Simon Pegg

Nine years after Kimberly Peirce's first film "Boys Don't Cry" hit theaters, her follow-up, "Stop-Loss," opens, an unlikely MTV Films take on the Iraq War. (My review of the film from SXSW is here.)

Scott Foundas at the LA Weekly suggests that Iraq-themed films are following the same arc as Vietnam-themed ones, which means that "Stop-Loss" serves "for today's audience, roughly the same cathartic purpose that movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter did for audiences of the '70s." Too much so, for him: "[T]he film so effectively reconstitutes its own Vietnam-homecoming touchstones that we can anticipate its every move well before it makes them." He deems the film "sincere without being especially memorable." Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly calls the film "heartfelt" while concluding that it "holds so much of its rage in check -- and keeps such a nervous eye on the attention span of its audience -- that it ultimately strangles itself." "This is a picture that takes a serious subject everyone in America should care about," adds Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, "and turns it into drama so aggressively mediocre that you're forced to guilt yourself into caring about the characters in front of you. This is a movie about pain and suffering (both the emotional and physical kinds) that never lets its own guard down for a minute."

A.O. Scott at the New York Times finds the film becomes "confused," but that "this confusion can be seen as a measure of its honesty": "It is an imperfect movie -- marred, if anything, by its sincere affection and undisciplined compassion -- about the imperfect young men who keep returning to a war the rest of us would prefer not to think about." "This is still a fantasy," writes Armond White at the New York Press. "Peirce conflates war tragedy with her own sense of melodrama, making Stop-Loss a coincidentally sexy polemic. It could be worse." Nathan Rabin at the Onion AV Club finds it couldn't be much better: "Stop-Loss is a human story first and foremost, and Peirce and her stellar young cast ensure that the message never gets in the way of the storytelling."

[Photo: "Stop-Loss," Paramount Pictures, 2008]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (3)

Tags: Kimberly Peirce, Stop-Loss

In the follow-up to his acclaimed 2005 film "Man Push Cart," Ramin Bahrani returns to the unseen (well, at least on screen) underbelly of New York City with "Chop Shop," which follows the lives of Alejandro, an orphaned boy who, along with his teenage sister, struggles for survival amidst the junkyards and questionable auto body shops in Willets Point, Queens. The film opened in New York on Wednesday (check out an interview with Bahrani here) — once again, the critics applaud.

David Edelstein at New York deems the film "a low-budget vérité triumph": "Chop Shop isn't so beautiful or artfully sculpted, and you can't shake it off as just a movie. You want to head out on the 7 train and find this little boy--or someone like him." In his Toronto 2007 review, Roger Ebert wrote that "Now we have an American film with the raw power of 'City of God' or 'Pixote,' a film that does something unexpected, and inspired, and brave." Andrew O'Hehir at Salon compares the film to Bresson's "Pickpocket" and de Sica's "The Bicycle Thief," going on to write "I know, that's a hell of a lot for a movie by a 32-year-old unknown to live up to, but I haven't seen an American film in many years that so clearly rates the comparison." Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE notes that these resemblances aren't only in stylistic similarities, but also moral ones: "Alejandro... isn't to be merely pitied, but to be understood as a person with the same aspirations and faults as us all, only under circumstances that make each decision a possible do or die one, allowing little room for error."

At the New York Times, A.O. Scott points out that the film's unflinching realism doesn't obscure a sense of beauty: "there is nonetheless a lyricism at its heart, an unsentimental, soulful appreciation of the grace that resides in even the meanest struggle for survival." Adds Nathan Lee at the Village Voice:

Bahrani doesn't omit hardship so much as subsume it within the larger framework of his benevolent sensibility. Chop Shop avoids the pitfalls of romanticism (and miserablism) by keying this empathic touch to the consciousness of Ale and Isa. For them, Willets Point is simply home, and if their ecosystem, precarious as it is, sometimes feels enchanted, that's because children always transform their surroundings into playgrounds or battlegrounds--arenas of struggle and play.

And two qualifications, from Noel Murray at the Onion AV Club and Nick Schager at Slant. Murray suggests that "All that's holding Chop Shop back from being a great movie--as opposed to a merely good one--is that there really isn't much to it." Schager finds that "Bahrani's screenplay occasionally feels too scripted for its own good," and that "the film nonetheless too often fails to get under one's skin emotionally."

[Photo: "Chop Shop," Koch Lorber Films, 2007]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (2)

Tags: Chop Shop, Ramin Bahrani

"Chicago 10," Brett Morgen's doc about the eight anti-war protesters put on trial after the explosive 1968 Democratic National Convention, was the opening night film at Sundance last year, and finally makes it to theaters today. The doc is noteworthy for its mixing of archival footage with reenacted courtroom segments depicted in motion capture animation (à la Robert Zemeckis' "The Polar Express") with actors like Hank Azaria and Liev Schreiber reading the words of Abbie Hoffman and William Kunstler.

It works for Andrew O'Hehir, who, in a Sundance-dated review at Salon, lauds the way Morgen goes about "ignoring or breaking all the rules of documentary film, and by smashing the historical vitrine that has long contained these events and dragging them out into the light." "In its best moments, and they are considerable," he adds, "'Chicago 10' makes you see 1968, that near-apocalyptic year, with fresh eyes, as an extraordinary turning point in history now at least partly set free from boomer nostalgia and regret." But most who like the film find some trouble with the animated sections. Tasha Robinson at the Onion AV Club dislikes that "Morgen can't resist using the animation to add a surreal flair: Allen Ginsberg floats everywhere he goes, in full meditative position, and when Hoffman throws a kiss to the jury, the "camera" follows it, Roger Rabbit style... Chicago 10 is a lot of fun, but it could stand to take its subjects a little more seriously, if only because they themselves are so frequently goofy that mocking them is complete overkill." For EW's Owen Gleiberman, the vocals are the issue: "Every line is spoken with a stagy rim-shot vitality, as if Morgen had to keep reminding us that the trial wasn't just a trial -- it was theater, man! What you miss is how the defendants, in that dull bureaucratic courtroom, became bound, in spirit, to the world they were attacking." The animation "looks rather cruder than your average PS3 game," notes Glenn Kenny at Premiere. "But never mind. The material is incredibly compelling."

Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer notes that he turned a comfy 40 in 1968 and remembers the year all too well. And, in fact, most of the review is about that, until he eventually allows that "Still, it wouldn't hurt anyone, young or old, to catch up on the fascinating history lesson."

J. Hoberman at the Village Voice notes the film is a "deliberately ahistorical treatment," and finds it doesn't quite grasp its era: "However authentically chaotic, Chicago 10 is insufficiently frenzied." And A.O, Scott at the New York Times is less charmed: "The problem is that 'Chicago 10' seems wholly unwilling to examine the limits of its view of history, or indeed to engage any sense of history beyond the superficialities of rhetoric and image... If you really want to know what the '60s were about, you'll do better to look elsewhere."

[Photo: Brett Morgen's "Chicago 10," Roadside Attractions, 2007]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (3)

Tags: Brett Morgen, Chicago 10

George A. Romero's "Diary of the Dead" has been drawing mixed reactions since its premiere at Toronto -- some critics find the zombie update nothing short of brilliant, others heavy-handed and ponderous. Of the first school is Premiere's Glenn Kenny, who proclaims that "besides an examination of us-against-them and us-against-us politics and a trenchant commentary on the it's-okay-to-torture-under-the-'right'- circumstances mentality that's been foisted on the American public, Diary is one of the most revealing and fascinating critiques of image-making since Michael Powell's Peeping Tom." Scott Foundas at LA Weekly, in a hefty review that offers more depth than the film it's addressing, writes "It's a zombie movie by way of Brecht and Godard: Where most directors strive to elide the audience's awareness of the physical filmmaking process, Romero delights in exposing the rivets and joints holding together his movie's disparate pieces." In another lengthy piece brought on by the film, Slant's Jeremiah Kipp salutes the use of the first-person camera: "The front-line imagery forces audience identification, so when monsters trudge toward us in the distance or pop up around the corner, the shock feels personal and direct."

"Romero initially conceived the project for Web-only broadcast, and if Poppa Zombie isn't quite the second coming of McLuhan when it comes to media critique, his return to small-scale indie filmmaking delivers big genre kicks," writes Nathan Lee at the Village Voice. "Diary of the Dead isn't bad," shrugs Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman. "It's a kicky B movie hiding inside a draggy, self-conscious-work-of-auteurist-horror one." "Even bad Romero is a far sight more interesting than the coolly sadistic guts-porn that currently passes for mainstream horror," claims Slate's Dana Stevens, who does add that "Diary's constant stream of sociopolitical speechifying, most of it channeled through Deb's voiceover, often sounds like an old crank on the corner waving a 'The End Is Nigh' sign." A similar sentiment from Michael Koresky at indieWIRE: "[A]s smartly staged, and even emotionally tender as it often is, Romero's latest, with its central and oft-repeated mistrust of the "new information age," also can't help but seem a little like the product of aged paranoia--like your pissed-off grandpa, a little preachy and slightly doddering."

Amongst the disappointed: "Diary asks some compelling questions about documentarians' responsibility to the people they're chronicling. Then it asks them again and again and again, wasting scores of valuable brain-munching opportunities in the process," sighs Nathan Rabin at the Onion AV Club. "There's some striking filmmaking in 'Diary of the Dead,' but there's also a lot of less-than-elegant speechifying," writes the New York Times' Manohla Dargis. "Having already scared the stuffing out of us with his past films, Uncle George has decided it's time for a good talk." "It should be said that Romero's lack of oomph is not just a sign of his age. It's also a matter of conviction," suggests David Edelstein at New York, adding that "Romero can't make a first-person movie without indicting his own techniques." And at Salon, Andrew O'Hehir proclaims a life-long soft spot for Romero, and then addings:

"Diary of the Dead" is a limp and dreary experience, at least after you get past its intriguing premise. It's poorly written and woodenly acted, completely formulaic and hopelessly imprisoned by both its genre and finally its form. I mean, it's great that George Romero knows about MySpace, I guess, but spicing up a middling, muddling zombie flick with a few electronic-lifestyle fillips is beneath him, frankly.

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (1)

Tags: Diary of the Dead, George A. Romero, zombies

The title of Cao Hamburger's "The Year My Parents Went on Vacation" is euphemistic. The main character, a 12-year-old boy named Mauro, is the child of activists in 70s Brazil who are forced to stow him with his grandfather and go underground in order to avoid arrest -- only his grandfather has died, and Mauro is instead cared for by the residents of his multi-ethnic São Paulo neighborhood. What has the potential to be (under darker auspices) a little sentimental is, according to the critics, in fact a little sentimental -- not necessarily a terrible thing. The New York Times' A.O. Scott finds the film "is most seductive when it focuses on the details of daily life in the lower-middle-class São Paulo neighborhood Bom Retiro. The rhythms of commerce, worship and domesticity -- the sounds of apartment house courtyards, synagogues and shops -- frequently overshadow what turns out to be a fairly conventional and sentimental story." Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer adds that "I found the film fascinating for showing me entertainingly a world I still know very little about. The performance of Master Joelsas and Ms. Piepszyk demonstrate once more that this is the golden age of child performers here and abroad." At the Village Voice, Jean Oppenheimer writes that "this warmly engaging film benefits from its understated approach (it suggests rather than spells out the political turmoil), and its light, comedic tone never mitigates the drama of the central story." And Nick Schager at Slant declares that "while there's nothing seriously objectionable about Cao Hamburger's film, there's also little to distinguish it from the pack, save for a pleasingly light directorial touch." "The Year My Parents Went on Vacation" was on the Oscar shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film, but didn't ultimately make the final five.

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Cao Hamburger, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation

"The Band's Visit," the first feature from Israeli director Eran Kolirin, was Israel's Foreign Language Film Oscar submission until the Academy rejected it for having too much English dialogue. The film is about how an Egyptian police force brass band headed for a performance at the opening of an Arab cultural center ends up in the wrong town in Israel, and there's a lot of English because it's the only language the townspeople and the band members have in common. That a film that's actually about cross-cultural confusion and communication gets disqualified from the category makes the idea of a "foreign language film" prize even sillier -- are subtitles really the end goal? Anyway, much love all round from our crowd of critics.

"[W]hat Kolirin achieves is--given our current hit-you-over-the-head cinematic climate--just about remarkable: a tender, poignant allegory for Arab-Israeli tensions that never makes a single overt gesture toward articulating its larger concerns," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "In the hands of another filmmaker, that same basic set-up might have made for an overly earnest exercise in getting to know thy former enemy" adds Scott Foundas at the LA Weekly. "But Eran Kolirin, the 34-year-old writer-director of The Band's Visit, has a sense of humor as dry as Bet Hatikva's arid desert wind and is too smart to bore us with ham-fisted humanistic bromides." Noel Murray at the Onion AV Club finds that "[t]onally, The Band's Visit steps gingerly on the line between 'sweetly humane' and 'cloyingly quirky,' but Kolirin pulls back the reins just enough, maintaining control by expressing as much with his framing as with his script."

At Salon, Andrew O'Hehir also suggests the film is worth sticking with through a seemingly sickly set-up, finding that it "has an irresistible tragic and romantic undertow," and that in the end, all the band's "encountered along the way is a few people and a few moments; almost nothing, really, but enough to suggest an entirely different world." "[T]he comedy eases you into the story and obscures the currents of seriousness swirling under the film's surface," notes Manohla Dargis at the New York Times. Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly lauds that way that "something marvelous happens as the filmmaker, in his first feature, expertly metes out small scenes of communication between people taught, for generations, to be wary of one another: This Band swings with the rhythms of hope." "'The Band's Visit' remains an astute crowd-pleaser without sacrificing its core emotional honesty," finds Michael Koresky at indieWIRE, while Anthony Lane at the New Yorker writes that "what [Kolirin] has conjured up is not some cloying, heal-the-world paean to political harmony but a meditation... on the tough art of rubbing along."

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Eran Kolirin, The Band's Visit

After a glowing critic reception as the opening night film at Sundance, playwright Martin McDonagh's feature debut "In Bruges" opens in theaters to somewhat more mixed reviews from our favorite critics. Liking it the most: Roger Ebert, who describes the film as "an endlessly surprising, very dark, human comedy," and raves that McDonagh "has made a remarkable first film, as impressive in its own way as 'House of Games,' the first film by David Mamet, who McDonagh is sometimes compared with." Also a fan is Glenn Kenny at Premiere, who notes that despite the film's marketing representing it as a kind of Guy Ritchie road movie, and "for all its very snappy dialogue and daringly crass humor, In Bruges aims to be about, in one character's words, 'guilt and sins and hell and all that.'" "All the leads are perfectly cast, and they help turn a light farce with thriller overtones into something deeper and sweeter," writes Tasha Robinson at the Onion AV Club, adding that the film is "an endless pleasant surprise."

Manohla Dargis at the New York Times deems "In Bruges" "a goof, both diverting and forgettable," concluding that McDonagh "talks a blue streak beautifully, but he has yet to find the nuance and poetry that make his red images signify with commensurate sizzle and pop." "McDonagh's basic ability is undeniable," writes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. "He writes carefully wrought duets for dialect, accommodates generous space for his actors to build character, and knows how to pack a scene with ballast... Then the question comes: what's the sum of these scenes? What's the angle in another hit man movie?" "Tolerably well-crafted, In Bruges is also mighty pleased with itself, and not entirely without reason," allows Ella Taylor at the LA Weekly, while finding that  "there's something glib and derivative about this clever chatter, and for all McDonagh's genuflections to Bosch, who never met an original sin he didn't want to commit to canvas, both the look and the moral agenda of In Bruges suggest warmed-over Italian surrealism with a dash of early Scorsese." Anthony Lane at the New Yorker adds that "you could argue that McDonagh is staking his claim to the infernal Boschean tradition; he even prepares the way by having Ray and Ken mull over the quandaries of guilt and damnation that they learned at school. Nice try, but I don’t buy it."

"For In Bruges to click, McDonagh needed either to get more real or more fake," suggests David Edelstein at New York, while Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum thinks the problems is that "McDonagh hasn't yet solved the construction of a feature film. The writer in him lets his characters declaim and banter too indulgently, and the theater guy in him positions his thespians as if envisioning stage-set changes, his eye not quite attuned to the cinematic requirements of movement through real space."

Liking the film the least: Nick Schager at Slant, who writes:

The tenor of [McDonagh's] material is hopelessly off, especially in the comedy department, here amounting to Farrell making jokes at little people's expense, having hoods slander each other as "gay" (or "poof"), and taking some crude, unearned jabs at boorish Americans that—considering the film's empty, self-consciously "clever" vulgarity and sizeable debt to stateside crime (and crime-buddy) pics—come off as the height of hypocrisy.

And Armond White at the New York Press (whose "here's what you should be talking about" choices this round are, distractingly, "Hitman" and "War") claims that "It’s deeply insulting to movie audiences when an award-winning playwright thinks that this sub-Tarantino nonsense carries the essence of cinema in some way."

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (0)

Armond White at the New York Press describes André Téchiné as "the best French director most Americans don’t know." "The Witnesses," Téchiné's latest film, focuses on a group of Parisian friends (among them Emmanuelle Béart and Michel Blanc) confronted with the onset of AIDS in 1984. Though it's a relatively quiet week for theatrical releases, the film, which opens in New York and California, is unlikely to be that inconceivable breakthrough that makes Téchiné a household name, but that's not for lack of love from the critics. White, who can't love one director without bashing another, takes a hachet to Olivier Assayas while writing that Téchiné "shows what life-affirming really means." "Téchiné takes the subtlest measure of class, race, and sexual difference within his narrative," adds Nathan Lee at the Village Voice. "The first hour of Witnesses is the best thing of its kind since Kings and Queen, Arnaud Desplechin's dizzying meta-melodrama, though Téchiné meets that picture's onrushing richness sans dependence on rhetorical pyrotechnics." Michael Koresky at indieWIRE suggests that "Téchiné is fascinated by the ways in which lives interact, personalities cross-pollinate, wounds are compounded, exacerbated, or even healed, yet never in that increasingly mundane American style of overlapping stories that prize fate or coincidence; he paints specifically, creating not vague character sketches but full lives, however defined by enigma or contradiction."

At New York, David Edelstein describes the film as "excitingly convoluted," seeing the shift from melodrama to AIDS drama as "literally a coitus interruptus" and concluding that "It’s no mean feat to shift the hub and leave us more intrigued than annoyed." Stephen Holden at the New York Times salutes the way that the film "sidesteps most of its opportunities for high drama, political sermonizing and the jerking of tears," going on to write that "Mr. Téchiné refuses to pass moral judgment on any human behavior pertaining to love and desire. His recognition that these things are transient and constantly changing frees him to take a longer view."

David Denby at the New Yorker expresses a few hesitations, mainly that "The Witnesses" is "highly intelligent, but, still, one wants more out of this particular subject than lucidity and good sense."

Téchiné has made such strong movies as "French Provincial" (1975) and “Wild Reeds” (1994), but “The Witnesses,” despite some bouts of temper and bitterness, has a largely placid bourgeois surface... Rawness is a quality that seems to have disappeared from French cinema with the death of Maurice Pialat.

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (0)

"Juno," the would-be sassy girl-child crossroads where "Little Miss Sunshine," "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Rushmore" meet, is being presented as this year's sleeper indie darling, the soft-beneath-the-snark candidate Fox Searchlight's hoping will sneak in to snag awards, hearts and box office dollars. We must admit, we watched it anticipating the fact that we would loathe it as we have many a heartfelt whimsyfest, but ended up laughing. But... also still sort of loathed it — there's something about the relentless accessorizing of layers of quirk on top of all of the characters that we couldn't get over when the film tried for emotional appeal. (We did love the parents, played by Allison Janney and JK Simmons.)

Anyway, the critics are generally quite fond, while echoing complaints about "Juno"'s first section. A.O. Scott at the New York Times admits to gnashing his teeth for the first 15 minutes before settling in to find "the film outgrows its own mannerisms and defenses, evolving from a coy, knowing farce into a heartfelt, serious comedy."  Stephanie Zacharek at Salon agrees that for the first 20 minutes, "Juno" "appears to be one of those movies clogged with quotation marks," but that "Instead of hiding these behind a scrim of quotation marks, Reitman, Cody and their actors put their hearts on their sleeves: Their movie is intimate and inclusive, the exact opposite of groovier-than-thou." "[T]he early-going rough patches that are more Wes Anderson than even Wes Anderson could imagine," writes Robert Wilonsky at the Village Voice, adding that "once it works its way through the first-timer's lookatme! snark, Juno evolves into a thing of beauty and grace."

"[T]he movie's biggest surprise, and reward, turns out to be the maturity and appreciation with which Cody and Reitman handle the grown-ups in the mix," lauds Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly, while Ella Taylor at the LA Weekly muses that "I’m not sure I’d call Juno ground-breaking — for that you’d need a pimply heroine who stays that way and still gets the guy — but what sets this engaging little movie above the pack of glib, brittle or sickly-sweet teen comedies is the clear eye it casts on the suburban American family, while stoutly defending that battered institution’s elastic ability to adapt."

Dana Stevens at Slate loves the performances, and notes Michael Cera's character's confession: "'I try really hard.' So does Diablo Cody's script, but like Paulie, it's sweet-spirited enough to get away with it most of the time." "That's Juno's appeal in a nutshell," adds the Onion AV Club's Scott Tobias. "It comes off as calculatedly irreverent at times, and its Wes Anderson-isms are too precious by half, but its sweetness is genuine and next-to-impossible to resist." Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer believes that "Juno represents an almost magical configuration of very talented people with very much the same brand of whipsaw humor," and in a review from back at Toronto, Roger Ebert writes that "Every element in the movie, including her getting pregnant, and her non-boyfriend, and her parents, and the couple that wants to take the baby for adoption, is completely unlike any version of those characters I have ever seen before. And the dialogue is so quick and funny you feel the actors are performing it on a high wire."

Dissenters: David Edelstein at New York finds that "The relentlessly jokey banter of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is taken to a screechy new level. Every character’s wisecracks come from the same place, like in bad Neil Simon." He's also unimpressed by the fact that "The jokes disappear for the end of each segment, when you’re supposed to shed a little tear." Michael Koresky at indieWIRE deems the film "self-satisfied" and writes that "taking a step back from the hype, it's hard not to feel like this aggressively clever, ultimately sentimental high-school comedy is less true seasonal counter-programming than just another Hollywood wolf in indie sheep clothing."

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (0)

In many ways, Julian Schnabel's often majestically off-putting presence in person makes the excellent reviews that "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is receiving all the more impressive — one never wants to encourage someone so secure in the conviction of his own genius. The film, which is based on the memoir Jean-Dominique Bauby dictated by blinking his left eyelid after a stoke left the rest of him paralyzed, is now looking like a major year-end best-of/award candidate. We liked it too, though not as much — our review from the New York Film Festival is here.

"Whatever Schnabel’s posturings as a painter," writes David Edelstein at New York, "he’s a major film director, alive not only to light and texture but to characters’ emotions—which twist the light and warp the textures and permeate the canvas." Raves David Denby at the New Yorker, "Schnabel’s movie... is a gloriously unlocked experience, with some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera and some of the most daring, cruel, and heartbreaking emotional explorations that have appeared in recent movies." Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly is cautious of the overly gorgeous film, noting that "I tend to be wary of ethereal composition applied to unpoetic, human, physical mess, for its romanticizing, narcotizing effect," but in this case finding that "this assertive adaptation brings Jean-Dominique Bauby's phenomenal memoir... to life honestly." Armond White at the New York Press, chooses to devote most of his review to ragging on "Control," but still declares that "Diving Bell" "tells a real person’s life story so inventively you might forget how rotten recent biopics have been."

Glenn Kenny at Premiere notes that "Diving Bell" is "an exemplary film about the so-called triumph of the human spirit by largely upending every cliché the usual cinematic treatment of the triumph of the human spirit indulges." "At times, 'Bell' seems heightened and romanticized, particularly in the way everyone around Bauby remains supportive and attentive, even at their own expense," adds Tasha Robinson at the Onion AV Club. "But that just prevents the film from becoming standard-arc disease-of-the-week fare, with its programmed trials and inevitable victories. Instead, Schnabel's sleepy, drifty, at times morbidly funny film tackles something more ambitious, by getting into the head of someone who's trying to get out of there himself."

A.O. Scott at the New York Times writes that Schnabel "demonstrates his own imaginative freedom in every frame and sequence, dispensing with narrative and expository conventions in favor of a wild, intuitive honesty," and Salon's Stephanie Zacharek muses that "The picture is so imaginatively made, so attuned to sensual pleasure, so keyed in to the indescribable something that makes life life, that it speaks of something far more elemental than mere filmmaking skill: This is what movies, at their best, can be." "Conscious life itself, even at its most extremely limited parameters, has never been so richly ennobled on the screen as it is here," concludes Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer.

Dissenters: Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE is ambivalent: "So is this art cinema posing as a middle-brow biopic, or a middle-brow biopic posing as art cinema? Either way, it's an engrossing oddity, a film that is too superficial and obvious to be truly profound but also too strikingly vivid and affecting to be dismissed." Nick Schager at Slant is not, and declares that Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood have adapted Bauby's memoir "with only slightly more restraint than that shown by competitive gorger Kobayashi at Nathan's annual hot dog-eating contest. It's Johnny Got His Gun (or, at least, the portions used in Metallica's 'One' video) via My Left Foot, stylistically Miramax-ized to within an inch of its life."  And Scott Foundas at the LA Weekly writes, hilariously, that if the Cannes Best Director award (which "Diving Bell" won) "were determined solely on the basis of quantity, there would be no question that Schnabel’s was deserved, for there is more directing per square inch of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly than one is likely to find in any other movie released this year."

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (0)

There seems to be something admirable about how pugilisticly didactic Robert Redford's "Lions for Lambs" is, with its spoonful of high-octane star Splenda to make the liberal guilt go down. And the film does have its unanticipated fans: Stephanie Zacharek at Salon acknowledges that it's "self-righteous, didactic, dramatically and visually static and, in places, extremely boring," yet also finds it works:

Redford and [screenwriter Michael Matthew] Carnahan clearly intend it as a call to arms, which explains why the movie sometimes feels like a civics lesson, albeit one given by a moderately entertaining instructor. Still -- like a good civics lesson -- the picture adamantly spins out questions rather than answers.

Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman writes that "Lions for Lambs is so square it's like something out of the gray twilight glow of the golden age of television...Yet Carnahan's writing ignites familiar issues with vigor and snap; there's audacity in its attempt to seize us with nothing but a war of rhetoric." Ella Taylor at the LA Weekly allows that "The movie is awful — and also oddly touching, even adorable in its dogged sense of responsibility, its stubborn refusal of style." "Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is the clunkiest, windiest, and roughest of the [new antiwar pictures]," writes David Edelstein at New York. "Most of it is dead on the screen. But its earnestness is so naked that it exerts a strange pull. You have to admire a director who works so diligently to help us rise above all the bad karma."

And surprise defender Armond White at the New York Press declares that "As you think along with the film’s presentation of ideas and watch characters caught in moments of moral and political tension, Lions for Lambs starts to articulate the stress of this political era." "Cruise, Streep and Redford do what movie star-artists are supposed to do," he adds. (No "smug"? No "condescending"?)

Elsewhere, a lukewarm Roger Ebert sighs "Useful new things to be said about the debacle in Iraq are in very short supply. I'm not sure that's what 'Lions for Lambs' intends to demonstrate, but it does, exhaustingly." Adds Anthony Lane at the New Yorker, "It winces with liberal self-chastisement: Redford is surely smart enough to realize, as the professor turns his ire on those who merely chatter while Rome burns, that his movie is itself no better, or more morally effective, than high-concept Hollywood fiddling." Manohla Dargis at the New York Times writes that the film "tells us everything most of us know already, including the fact that politicians lie, journalists fail and youth flounders."

"For the life of me, I can’t figure out what the point of all this onscreen palaver is supposed to be," writes Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer. "Of course, we should all be better human beings. So what else is new? And is a time-coded movie talkfest the best way to persuade us?" Dana Stevens at Slate suggests that "Lions for Lambs appears to have been created by someone who's never seen one of these newfangled contraptions called 'movies,' or for that matter, witnessed that phenomenon known as 'speech.'" Slant's Nick Schager adds that "it runs a brisk 88 minutes in large part because it doggedly, frustratingly refuses to truly delve into the issues it brings up, mistaking newspaper headline-based speeches full of tired talking points for thrilling, incisive debate." And we'll give the last word to Nathan Rabin at the Onion AV Club, who concludes that "All talk and zero characterization, it doesn't even feel like a real movie. Just because a film's premise is ripped from the headlines doesn't mean it needs to feel like an op-ed piece."

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (0)

Even the New York Press' Armond White likes the Coen brothers' "No Country For Old Men," adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy: "It would be pathetic to reduce/praise No Country as a thriller. The Coens’ technique goes far beyond that. Moss, Chirgurh and Bell’s appointments with mortality lift the film from plot mechanisms to a confrontation with fate." Solid to delirious praise from most of the rest of our usual round of critics. We particularly liked this, from A.O. Scott at the New York Times:

[T]he most lasting impression left by this film is likely to be the deep satisfaction that comes from witnessing the nearly perfect execution of a difficult task. “No Country for Old Men” is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists — those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design — it’s pure heaven.

"'No Country for Old Men' is as good a film as the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have ever made, and they made 'Fargo,'" adds Roger Ebert. "This movie is a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate. It is also, in the photography by Roger Deakins, the editing by the Coens and the music by Carter Burwell, startlingly beautiful, stark and lonely." From Scott Foundas at the LA Weekly:

It's easy to imagine how the Coens, whose Achilles' heel has always been their predilection for smug irony and easy caricature, might have turned McCarthy's taciturn Texans into simplistic western-mythos archetypes: the amoral criminal, the righteous peacekeeper, and the naive but basically good-hearted rube in over his head. Instead, they've made a film of great, enveloping gravitas, in which words like "hero" and "villain" carry ever less weight the deeper we follow the characters into their desperate journeys.

Keith Phipps at the Onion AV Club deems the film "a strong return after a few years off" for the Coens, while Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly writes that the film "reverses [their] slide into arch pastiche, brilliantly."