Movie Reviews
Beg pardon, but it has taken me a week to untie my tongue on the subject of Antichrist, which closes out its seven days at the Ken on Thursday. A piece of art-house schlock from …
Are you having enough chances to see documentaries? I myself in the past couple of weeks missed my chances at Fuel and The Way We Get By, the latest environmental and Iraq War documentaries respectively. …
If I had to read it cover to cover before reviewing it, there’s no telling when I would have leave to speak of Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber. Issued on …
The standard line on A Serious Man, and I see no reason to deviate from it, is that this is the Coen brothers’ most “personal” work to date. To be sure, the brothers have never …
You simply wish to nip over to France for a couple, three weeks, prior to the full-on rush of prize-hunters in the year’s final quarter, and you find on your return that new movies by …
The pace holds steady…. The September Issue. R.J. Cutler’s documentary version of The Devil Wears Prada, a revealing inside look at the putting-together of the year’s fattest issue of Vogue, what turns out to be …
Collision of the end of summer and the start of fall: massive pileup. Quite separate from the seven new movies that opened in our town last Friday alone, eight more are slated to open this …
The latest offering of “alternative” cinema at the Reading Gaslamp comes up easily to the Landmark caliber. Which, in light of such recent specimens as Captain Abu Raed, Shrink, and The Stoning Soraya M., isn’t …
August, the customary summer dumping ground, has suddenly yielded the best wide-release mainstream films of the season. And a long, long season it has been: the kickoff, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, feels like another year. Reparation …
You know very well, if you have been paying attention, what you are going to get from the Dardenne brothers of Belgium, Jean-Pierre and Luc. You are going to get quality control as rigid and …
As per its own punchy subhead, Julie and Julia is “based on two true stories,” parallel stories of feminist self-determination, set half a century apart, then and now. One focuses on Julie Powell, a beleaguered …
Pick of the week, pick of the season to date, is the French Séraphine, a speculative, segmentary biography — twenty years in scope — of an obscure figure from 20th-century art history, Séraphine Louis, dite …
Reteaming the star and director of Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles respectively, Brüno peddles the same or a similar shtick in a different persona: a different funny accent, different funny wardrobe, different funny …
Fictitious countdown of the final six weeks in the twelve-month tour of an army bomb squad in Baghdad five years back, The Hurt Locker seems on a limited sampling to have excited other commentators more …
The news, or at any rate the publicity, that Woody Allen had originally written Whatever Works for Zero Mostel (d. 1977) and had only lately pulled the script out of a drawer and plugged in …
The art-house patron can only take what he gets. Last time out I noted that the Japanese director of Departures, Yojiro Takita, though he has literally dozens of films in his résumé, was a new …