Your life surges ahead as it is, pretty much, but maybe tinted blue. Maybe everything around you is tilted a bit, and strips of light glow on the wall, like an SUV with its brights on is idling on a ramp facing your window blinds. Your world looks not like…
Because it’s called Austenland, and because it’s a romantic comedy, you probably expect it to open with “It’s a truth universally acknowledged” and to wrap with one lovesick sap madly dashing after another, right up to an airport’s departure gates, even though both presumably have cell phones and could just…
Here’s a humble wig-out, a curio that could endure beyond its creators’ more demonstrably successful works — and for decades will certainly confound audiences who think they’re streaming/torrenting/eye-jacking some broad Paul Rudd comedy they had forgotten about. Prince Avalanche director David Gordon Green gives star Rudd more chances to charm…
With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer/director Sebastián Silva’s altered-states/group dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy — weaknesses you’ll likely recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is the pushy,…
Despite the giddy, gory ridiculousness of Kick-Ass 2, this summer’s most violent yet least punishing comic-book movie, there’s a kernel of ugly human truth at the core of the Kick-Ass fantasy. In the first issue of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass comic, from 2008, a lonely high school…
Besides its dozen or so big laughs and its winning streak of middle-upper-crust romantic jadedness, Dan Mazer’s I Give It a Year has going for it a trait you might have thought had been bred out of audience-pleasing romantic comedies by now: suspense about with whom its leads will find…
How would those Bronze Age storytellers who shaped and handed down the myths of Ancient Greece fare in a modern screenwriting seminar? All that elusive, improvisatory strangeness, that alien sense of causality, that emphasis on origins, not just of franchisable characters but of everything in the natural world, right down…
Here’s something you would think we could all agree on: Rigid parts of the body probably shouldn’t go slack. But try asking a SeaWorld spokesperson about the drooping dorsal fins on so many of the park chain’s performing male orca, about that mighty spike that in the wild juts above…
“I kept thinking she was the ugly duckling who was going to turn into a swan,” a fortyish loudmouth complained as the crowd trudged out of a preview screening of The To Do List. “But she was an ugly duckling all the way through!” He was talking to two women…
Your end-times fantasy most likely says a lot about you. Adherents to the Left Behind eschatology must at some level relish the notion of everyone who doesn’t believe what they believe facing holy wrath, and what eco-conscious citizen of the Earth hasn’t thought, uncharitably, of how satisfying it will be…
Like first sex, writer/director Maggie Carey’s debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise, but not quite adept at getting everyone off. It’s an impossibly huge deal yet also a modest achievement, something we have to go through but will no doubt be…
Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-into-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement, or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…
With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer-director Sebastián Silva’s altered-states/group-dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy—weaknesses you’ll likely recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is the pushy, wheedling neediness of…
Midnight’s Children: The Gist of Salman Rushdie’s Novel
Because it opens with a suicide bombing in downtown Tel Aviv, and because its mystery plot involves an attempt to track down a sheik whose public expectorations call for the slaughter of Israeli civilians, The Attack is most avowedly “about” terrorism. But that’s a subject, not the subject. The film,…
White House Down Is the Best Parody Since Team America
Terrorizing children in their bedrooms remains the existential concern of the toothy blobs, hams, and pop-pom-furred Wild Things that populate Monsters movies, many of whom look like gummy nothings long stuck to the bottom of Pixar’s junk drawer. Their very lives depend upon coaxing night-screams from human kids, a premise…
Sometimes, there’s just too damn much to say about a movie than can fit into any one review. (Even Stephanie Zacharek’s exhaustive, excellent one.) So, here’s more: Stephanie Zacharek, our lead film critic, and Film Editor Alan Scherstuhl hashing over all the portentous craziness in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel…
In Evocateur, Morton Downey Jr. Roars Again
From the peak of Anchorman to the nadir of Burt Wonderstone, the formula for studio comedies of the past 20 years has been simple: Dude acts like a dick for an hour, turns blandly sweet toward the end, and then everyone on the DVD commentary can claim to have made…
The Purge: Your Family or This Homeless Guy?
Fast & Furious 6 Is Sublime Dumb Play
