Kevin Bowen

MECHANICAL BUT EFFECTIVE Any review of Michael Haneke’s Amour should start by noting what a moving story it tells. Did I cry during Amour? Two-ply tissues. Amour gives a gentle but chilling view into the final months of a woman’s life, and the frustration of a husband who must care for his loved one as…

WEIGHED DOWN BY GLITTERING JEWELS Over-conceived and under-emoted, Joe Wright’s experimental Anna Karenina is art-directed to within both an inch of brilliance and an inch of death. This version of the Tolstoy novel indulges the British in three of their favorite pastimes: Stage, adapting novels, and pretending they’re Russian without actually performing Russian accents (how…

DISHONET ABE Historical movies are often made as historical parallel. They comment on our time as much as their time. On some level this is the inevitable nature of history – taking from the past what is necessary to explain the present. Historical parallel clearly seems to be the intention of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, which…

BOND TO THE PAST And as the fog rolls in across the Scottish moors, the old woman turns to the young friend she had recently ordered to his death. He grew up an orphan, now wrinkled. She asks how his parents died. There is a moment of hesitation, then a slant in his voice. “You…

MAP OF THE AGES Cloud Atlas, the latest effort from the Wachowskis, wraps a half-dozen stories, settings, and groups of characters into one film. But it doesn’t matter how many stories they do, their song remains the same. The Matrix helmers have hit the same point for a while now: Liberty is the freedom from…

WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE ARGO Sixty years ago, at a time of worldwide turmoil, a script that had bounced around finally made it into production. It involved the tangled lives of desperate political refugees trying to escape political danger to America. It ended at an airport, where a handful of classic movie characters decided their problems…

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH Whatever happened to misbegotten youth in American cinema? Don’t you long for the old days, when young misfits stole things? And ran everywhere? And were French? What happened to the old days, when a well-crafted American movie character could look forward to a life of crime on screen? Nowadays they take medication….

THE AMERICAN PAST TIME Driving to a screening of Trouble with the Curve last week, I was struck by how different my childhood must be from that of today’s children. It was a cool late summer evening. Children should be running through the front yards of the neighborhood. Where were the children playing ball? There…

COSMOPOLIS: FILMING THE UNFILMABLE To properly critique David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, the relationship between film and literature should be addressed in both a general and historical sense.   The challenge that cinema placed upon the primacy of literature in the last century has resulted in marketplace rivalry.   As with any respectable products, the two began to differentiate:…

CELESTE IS A HOLLYWOOD STUDIO FILM IN DISGUISE Is Celeste and Jesse Forever really an indie movie? Or is it a Hollywood rom-com with impoverished financial backing, all dressed in crusty jammies and without its makeup in the morning? If you even ask that question, then you know the movie leaves its evidence like a…

ALTHOUGH NO MORE THAN A DATE MOVIE, THERE ARE SPARKS IN RUBY We’ve been struck by an invasion of Zoes: Owl-eyed ingénues with perky, quirky, life-embracing formulas for living, whose purpose is to brighten the lives of pasty young men needing sunshine in both body and soul. The Zoe in question in Ruby Sparks is…

ARCHER GLAD ABOUT THE REDHEAD HEROINE? If you were a Scottish princess, wouldn’t using a spell to turn your mother the queen into a bear be considered an act of insurrection? It’s hard to imagine that in real life Merida – the red-headstrong princess in Disney Pixar’s Brave – would avoid the tower for very…

THE FUTURE AS PAST The Hunger Games will sap up comparisons to science fiction – that’s what happens with stories about futuristic dystopias and freaky hovercraft – but the better comparison is to Roman or Biblical epics of the fifties. Its story – of the teenagers of 12 outlying provinces exploited for the bloodsport of…

DON’T HATE ME BECAUSE I’M PRETTY MUCH RECOMMENDING THIS GUILTY PLEASURE I’m allowed one disastrous recommendation per year, right? And here it is already December, and I don’t think I’ve used it yet. So just like those dental insurance benefits that you’re eager to max out before the calendar changes :. consider yourself warned. So…

THE CONVERSATION BELATEDLY BEGINS We Need to Talk About Kevin isn’t the first film this year to outlast its immediacy. A novel written by Lionel Shriver in the wake of the Columbine school killings, director Lynne Ramsay has been trying to make the film since her last feature, Morvern Callar, in 2002. The unusually long…

LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF SEX A man. A woman. An underground train. Traded looks. Traded fantasies. No one looking. No one aware.   The train stops. The lick of her lips. The ring on her finger. Will they? Won’t they? The crowd in the station. The man is Brandon. We soon meet the rest…

DON’T SPEAK! It is common to think of the Silent Era as cinematic pre-history, a lost era ruled over by tyrannosaurs and Charlie Chaplin. Even the most dutiful moviegoers have left silents for so much pterodactyl meat, with a few known comedy routines kept around as much for anthropology as enjoyment. For most, movie history…

YOU’LL SEE IT AND YOU’LL LIKE IT Who doesn’t love The Muppets? Birds love them. Bees love them. Even monkeys stuck in trees love them. That’s been the case since the 1970s, when Jim Henson first stuck his hand into a green sock and pulled out a cultural icon. (I know, he’s not really a…

PERFECT MOVIE, OR MOST PERFECT MOVIE EVER? The revered New Yorker critic Pauline Kael famously stated that great films are rarely perfect films. Do we ever wonder about the opposite? Are perfect films rarely great films? As the ultimate easy swallow, The Descendants – the latest release from Sideways writer/director Alexander Payne – has been…

LOVE AND DISTANCE I don’t think I’ve seen anything lately quite like the ending of the 2011 Sundance Jury Prize winner Like Crazy. Spending time watching the rise and disintegration of a marriage, I wondered, is there really a moment when a romance ends? When the present becomes irretrievably the past? If so, then we’ve…