During one fateful night of insomnia in 1894, Frenchman Louis Lumière invented the cinématographe, a portable, hand-cranked film camera that fit into a suitcase one man could easily carry. Soon he began setting it up in places where people gathered — train stops, busy intersections, and riverbanks — trying to…
Remember the 1985 movie version of the Parker Brothers whodunit board game Clue, with its pre-DVD-era gimmick of multiple endings? Well, Vantage Point is like that, only instead of multiple endings, it gives us multiple beginnings. Oh, and Vantage Point, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t supposed to be…
The pleasures of Be Kind Rewind do not extend far beyond the promise of its premise: Jack Black, magnetized and manic (yawn), erases every single videotape in the rental store where he hangs out and has to reshoot the movies with pal Mos Def. Theirs becomes a ramshackle filmography of…
Like most wannabe heroes of the eager-to-please teen comedy, poor little rich boy Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) is too charming by half and not nearly quirky enough. Expelled from his ritzy private school, our blazered hero soon finds himself dispatched to a public school by his desperate single mother (Hope…
Margot at the Wedding (Paramount) Margot (Nicole Kidman, or someone who looks just like her) is a fiction writer whose tales are based, uncomfortably and unkindly, on the real-life family for whom she seems to care very little. Hence sister Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) late discovery that Margot’s a “monster”…
Black Water (Sony) Catacombs (Lionsgate) Chaos (Lionsgate) Cops: 20th Anniversary Edition (Fox) The Death of Adolf Hitler (Koch Vision) The Easter Bunny Is Comin’ to Town (1977) (Warner Bros.) The Final Inquiry (Fox) Gangsters: The Ultimate Film Collection (Universal) German Expressionism Collection (Kino) In the Valley of Elah (Warner Bros.)…
No Reservations (Warner Bros.) From its cheap, mid-’90s-looking package to its woefully scant extras (one pre-chewed Food Network behind-the-scenes, blech) to its wide-screen/full-screen option, this feels like something dropped right into the discount bins; it probably debuts at half off this week. And this soufflé of a romantic comedy deserves…
The Amateurs (First Look) The Beatrix Potter Collection (BBC Warner) Becoming Jane (Miramax) Blade: The Series — The Complete Series (New Line) Blue State (MGM) Charlie Chan: Volume 4 (Fox) Dallas: The Complete Eighth Season (Warner Bros.)Dedication (Weinstein) The Equalizer: Season One (Universal) Family Ties: The Third Season (Paramount) General…
Fleet-footed corpses are, from a physiological point of view, complete bullshit. “If you run that fast, your ankles will snap off,” says Jason Creed (Josh Close) to fellow film student Ridley (Philip Riccio), the gauze-wrapped lead of his no-budget mummy opus The Death of Death. Pausing to regroup, cast and…
No celebrity hairdresser should ever be allowed near Colin Farrell’s eyebrows with a tweezer. Black, fluffy, and gloriously unilateral, they still aren’t the prettiest things about In Bruges — that honor falls to the Belgian city itself, known for its scenic medieval turrets, bourgeois tedium, and unfavorable comparisons to Amsterdam…
Sandwiched somewhere between the American Spirit commercials and the Clinton campaigning that make up Definitely, Maybe is a surprisingly rewarding romantic comedy. Imagine, really, old-school Woody Allen starring that shit-eating smirker from Van Wilder, Ryan Reynolds. If this isn’t exactly Annie Hall or Manhattan, the mere fact it aspires to…
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros.) Beautifully shot, masterfully acted, and 19 hours too long, Assassination is an uneven mix of the artful and the arty that never had a shot at bringing in the audience that Brad Pitt’s chiseled melon should’ve delivered. Pitt…
Across the Universe (Sony) The Apartment: Collector’s Edition (MGM) The Aristocats: Special Edition (Disney) Blonde and Blonder (First Look) Boy Meets Girl (Unearthed) Drive-In Cult Classics: 8 Movie Collection (Navarre) Feast of Love (MGM) Fierce People (Lionsgate) The Jane Austen Book Club (Sony) Midnight Express 30th Anniversary Edition (Sony)Psychotronica: Volumes…
When a friend recently told me she’d been confused by the poster for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson fortune-hunting romp Fool’s Gold adorning her local multiplex — that she’d thought for sure this movie had already come and gone — I understood her bewilderment. Even as a professional film critic trained…
A fourth Rambo? The question isn’t why; it’s what took him so long. Was America’s avenging angel of meat just planning to sit out Fallujah and what we’re cooking up for Iran and Syria? (Oops — pretend that last part was redacted.) Okay, sure, last time we saw John Rambo,…
Faithful in style and spirit to the award-winning novel by Brian Morton, Andrew Wagner’s wise, observant, and exquisitely tacit chamber piece complicates every May-December, academic-novel cliché. A mutually dependent relationship unfolds between Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), an old-school writer of the Bellow-Roth-Howe generation of realists; and Heather (Six Feet Under’s…
The King of Kong (New Line) Seth Gordon’s best-of-2007 documentary, about the battle for Donkey Kong supremacy, remains a work in progress: Billy Mitchell, the longtime title-holder dethroned by Steve Wiebe over the course of this hysterical, thrilling, and occasionally sad little film, recently reclaimed the throne — and Wiebe…
Perhaps the most oft-quoted line from Zack Snyder’s cinematic adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel 300 is “Tonight we dine in Hell!” Chowing down on a box of Butterfinger minis during a screening of Meet the Spartans, you will truly understand what that means. You remember 300, right? A…
Three dimensions seem scarcely enough to contain the messianic impulses of the world’s hardest-rocking humanitarian aid project, and in this concert extravaganza, U2 finally gets a format scaled to its ambitions: the four-story IMAX screen, with 3-D technology tossed in to boot. Except for the eerie moment when Bono pleads…
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Sugar, which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival (and was inexplicably shut out at the closing-night awards ceremony), gets as much right about baseball as any movie I’ve ever seen. It gets the hum of the electric lights in…
Aqua Teen Hunger Force: 5 (Warner Bros.) Barn of the Naked Dead (Legend House) Bordertown (THINKFilm) Canvas (Universal) Chancer: Series 2 (Acorn Media) The Comebacks (Fox) Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Sixth Season (HBO) Daddy Day Camp (Sony) Damages: The Complete First Season (Sony) Drumline: Special Edition (Fox) El Cid:…
Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed return to the fray, is a curious project — well-crafted, personal, and movie-movie old-fashioned even in its vanguard aspirations. Simply put, it’s a Faustian romance about the reversal of time and transmigration of souls that, shot mainly in Romania, adds a soupçon of…
