“The Dark Knight Rises” debuts more new character posters
Has the Sacha Baron Cohen shtick jumped the shark?
Tim Grierson on Will Smith, the Last Movie Star
Exclusive download: Corporal, featuring Michael Shannon, presents “Glory”
It’s no secret that “The Walking Dead” bucked the norm by offering up a television series based on Robert Kirkman’s award-winning comic that was actually, well… really, really good. So how does one follow up on that kind of unexpected success? By taking the comic’s post-apocalyptic, zombie saga to the gaming world, apparently. The first…
Four years ago today, “Iron Man” arrived in theaters and kicked off a bold, long-term plan (by Hollywood standards, at least) that would see four different Marvel superheroes appear in their own solo movies, then unite in a single film featuring not just all of the previous films’ stars, but many of their supporting cast,…
There are a set of challenges to making a great concert film. The movie should make you feel like a participant at the event, give you the full expanse of the stadium show as though you are in the back of the house, and finally, connect you with the band as though you have better…
A version of this review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. For all the people crying onscreen in “Angels Crest,” I never once felt the urge to cry myself. The problem, I think, is not with what’s in the film but what’s not in the film, and that’s…
A few years ago, The Onion wrote an incredible article about Meryl Streep called “Name One Masterpiece Of Cinema That I’ve Starred In.” The commentary, written in Streep’s voice, savagely ridiculed — and astutely observed — the fact that Streep, maybe our greatest living actress, does not have the greatest filmmography. She’s appeared in a…
So many movies let their characters off easy. They occupy universes of absurd moral clarity; good and bad, black and white. In contrast, nothing in the fascinating new Iranian movie “A Separation” is that simple. Every decision its characters are forced to make — and they’re forced to make a lot of them — is…
In 1997, Robert Altman executive produced an interesting but short-lived television series called “Gun.” The only recurring member of the cast was a semi-automatic handgun; each episode featured an entirely new story with entirely new actors and one new owner of that same gun. Steven Spielberg‘s “War Horse” is basically the same idea, only with…
Steven Spielberg loves film. And not just movies, but the actual, physical medium of light projected through celluloid. He’s one of the last directors alive who still edits his work by painstakingly cutting and pasting strips of film instead of manipulating files on a computer. He doesn’t seem like the type of guy to embrace…
Captain America may be the first Avenger, but he’s also the penultimate test of a cinematic experiment that culminates in next year’s superhero ensemble film, “The Avengers.” Thus far, Marvel Studios’ plan has been a success, with Iron Man, Hulk, and Thor all managing to establish themselves with mainstream audiences individually, then transforming that success…
The title of Manuel Munoz’s first novel, “What You See in the Dark,” refers, among other things, to that act of unashamed voyeurism called moviegoing. At the heart of Munoz’s novel, set in Bakersfield, California, in 1959, are the preparations for the making of “Psycho,” which would come out the next year. Munoz understands Hitchcock’s…
M. Night Shyamalan’s new film “The Last Airbender” arrives in theaters groaning under the weight of several potentially handicapping burdens. First and foremost, the first season of Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender” (shorn to avoid confusion with James Cameron’s otherwise unrelated film), the 2005 Nickelodeon animated series upon which the…
If most recent documentaries assaying ’60s and ’70s rock and roll are any indication, filmmakers expect viewers to approach pop music history not with open minds but with empty heads. Case in point: the curiosity that led me to watch “Stones In Exile,” a recent non-fiction film on the making of the Rolling Stones beyond seminal…
Bright and attractive, ceaselessly curious about their world and about the words, emotions and sensations connecting them to it, the three unnamed siblings in Greek director and co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos’ remarkable new film “Dogtooth” would be the picture of healthy development — were they on the threshold of puberty. But the oldest daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia),…
If ever there were ever a book destined to both invite and elude a satisfactory film adaptation indefinitely, Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp magnum opus “The Killer Inside Me” is it. Much like Walker Percy’s 1961 novel “The Moviegoer,” the spare prose, snapshot precise detail and intimate first person narration of “Killer” project a film directly…
In the Ozark Mountain foothills depicted in “Winter’s Bone,” circumstances have awarded 17-year-old Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) a dubious promotion from high school student and eldest sibling to de facto head of the household. Her mother is nearly catatonic, and her father — who like much of her extended family and clannish impoverished community is involved…
You can tell right off the bat that “Splice”‘s genetic engineer couple Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody) are a poor fit for button-down corporate science, Canadian horror movie style. No cool Cronenbergian remove for these two! They live together in a warehouse loft, drive a vintage Gremlin, wear t-shirts with iconoclastic slogans printed…
A friend describes the “Sex and the City” films as “Ladies’ ‘Star Wars.’” The description isn’t far off the mark — not just because the TV series and the spinoff films are critic-proof revenue-generators, but also because Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and her gal pals inhabit a universe so far removed from anything resembling…
If you saw any the SNL sketches or the Super Bowl commercial featuring the nimrod government agent MacGruber — basically Richard Dean Anderson’s MacGyver by way of “The Jerk” hero Navin Johnson — you know to expect from the film that bears his name: five or six inspired bits, surrounded by padding. MacGruber (Will Forte)…
There are two kinds of bad films: actively bad and passively bad. Actively bad movies are engaging. They’re technically competent but utterly nonsensical (and/or offensive), or else so astoundingly inept in every conceivable way that they’re mesmerizing. The greatest actively bad films think they’re masterpieces and carry themselves with an unearned aura of importance. But…
With the release of “Iron Man 2,” the Marvel Comics franchise is officially two-for-two — two thoroughly competent, occasionally inspired yet ultimately forgettable films that promise sly engagement with real-world anxieties, then set that promise aside in favor of corporate intrigue and endless scenes of robots bashing the crap out of each other. The first…
Daniel Barber’s “Harry Brown” will provoke justifiable comparisons to 2008′s surprise hit “Gran Torino” — geezer with a past decides to clean his neighborhood of punks — but in some ways, it feels closer to that winter’s other surprise hit “Taken” — likable actor kills legions of faceless hoods. Michael Caine is the geezer in…
For better or worse, we live in the age of the action homage, in which popular filmmakers clutch their self-awareness like a talisman against their fears of the unknown — whether manifested through the sublime referentiality of “Inglourious Basterds” or the neurotic mimicry of “Watchmen.” What to make, then, of a film like Kim Ji-woon’s…
It’s no surprise to learn that Argentine director Juan José Campanella, whose “The Secret in Their Eyes” shocked the world by snatching the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar right out from under the expectant noses of Michael Haneke and Jacques Audiard earlier this year, has done some directing for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,”…
Originality can be overrated. Nash Edgerton‘s Aussie thriller “The Square” doesn’t really have an original bone in its body, and I’m not sure it needs to. It belongs to that well-worn noir subgenre of adulterous lovers attempting to make a break for it — “Blood Simple” is an obvious influence — but Edgerton eschews the…
Now is the early spring of our discontent. Every year around this time, many of the films clotting theaters are the indies no one thinks will secure an Oscar nomination or the big-budget features studios don’t have the faith will score sweet summer box-office numbers. Admittedly, these movies can turn out to be real gems…
