The title of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s strained dark comedy, in which the War in Afghanistan serves as the backdrop to an American woman’s self-actualizing journey, is the military phonetic-alphabet rendering of WTF. The mild Islamophobia and highly questionable casting choices in the film call to mind other texting…
The first Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s dopey, fitfully funny fashion spoof, was released less than three weeks after the September 11 attacks. Its sequel shows the extent to which another kind of nefarious plot — the cynical quest for world domination through cross-brand synergy — has proven impossible to eradicate on…
A kick for those who’ve distractedly thumbed through Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, Joel and Ethan Coen’s bustling comedy Hail, Caesar! looks back to the waning days of moviedom’s golden age: specifically, to 1951, when big-studio fixers were still tidying up the messes left by the talent (scrubbing now done by…
Few filmmakers explore the mysteries of coupledom as touchingly as Philippe Garrel, who specializes in mapping out romantic triangles (whether acute, obtuse or oblique). The rich enigmas of his latest movie, about a husband and wife, both in their forties and each unfaithful to the other, start with its evocative…
“Every film is a documentary of its actors,” Jean-Luc Godard once said. Starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, Andrew Haigh’s shattering marital drama 45 Years expands that maxim: As we gaze at and listen to these performers, whose characters reflect on nearly a half-century together — almost as long as…
In most of his eight films and especially since The Fighter (2010), choreographer of chaos and screwball scion David O. Russell has assembled boisterous, buoyant casts. His manic ensemble players, like those in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, carom off one another, their high-pitched energy keeping the movies bustling…
Fueled by impotent, blustery outrage, Adam McKay’s The Big Short, about the grotesque banking and investing practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is about as fun and enlightening as a cranked-up portfolio manager’s rue-filled comedown after an energy-shot bender. Based on Michael Lewis’s 2010 bestselling book of the…
No sentence distills the essence of one strain of cinephilia — mine especially — better than this one: “Motion pictures are for people who like to watch women.” Bracing in its profound simplicity, this line was written in 1983 by Boyd McDonald (1925–1993), author of the essential collection Cruising the…
New York has often been the setting for films about heroin addicts, with titles ranging from Shirley Clarke’s cinéma-vérité-tweaking The Connection (1961) to Slava Tsukerman’s new-wave cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) mining the drama of smack freaks tying off, shooting up, and nodding out. But Josh and Benny Safdie’s tough,…
Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner has an unerring talent for examining, skeptically but never cynically, grand notions about destiny: What we perceive as — or have convinced ourselves to be — the workings of fate, whether religious or romantic, is ultimately better understood as arbitrary or coincidental occurrences. In Lourdes (2009),…
For more than two decades, Alain Guiraudie has been unrivaled in depicting desires that upend convention, whether homo or hetero. In the comedy The King of Escape (2009), for instance, a middle-aged gay man falls in love with a 16-year-old girl; the film ends with an all-male gerontophilic ménage à…
When Claire Denis’ blood-and-lust-filled reverie Trouble Every Day, her most maligned project to date, premiered in New York in 2002, it opened on only one postage-stamp-size screen. Now comes the chance to consider anew — or, like this writer, see for the first time — a hypnotic, unsettling work by…
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To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to watch Jacques Audiard’s outrageous melodrama Rust and Bone without laughing. Loosely adapted from two works in Craig Davidson’s 2005 short story collection of the same name, Rust and Bone finds Audiard returning to the overdetermined characters and swift…
