Film

IN THE GROOVE Novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler said of the detective in any private-eye story, “He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.”   This goes a long way toward saying nothing, and in fact, all the detective “must be” is a cypher, a blank slate with a…

THE UNEXPECTED JOYS OF CHILDREN AT PLAY It would be easy to say, given his new film, I Wish, and his other classic film about children, Nobody Knows, that Hirokazu Kore-Eda has a way with children; but given the small body of authentic masterpieces he has directed – Maborosi, After Life, Still Walking – it…

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…

LOSING A BIKE AND A FATHER AT THE SAME TIME Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are always burrowing deep into the dirty soil from which we all presumably come. Life, to these extraordinary Belgian filmmakers, is hard and mean and filled with consequences that are not merely challenging but driven through with pain and despair. And,…

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…

ALL ABOUT JOURNALISM (Reviewer’s note: What do you do when you really like a film but disagree with it? You write a review like this.) I’ll start my review of The Rum Diary with a short explanation of why I ceased to be a journalist some time ago. Very simply, I never knew a journalist…

CAR MANUFACTURERS BEGIN TO GET IT When Dan Neil’”the eloquent car-guy columnist who formerly wrote for Car and Driver, AutoWeek and The Los Angeles Times, and who now writes for The Wall Street Journal’”says that he’ll never buy a gasoline-powered car again, you just have to take notice. “The only way forward is electric cars,”…

50% CHANCE OF LIVING; 90% CHANCE OF OFFENDING WOMEN If you hear the movie press machine tell it, I’m supposed to come away from 50/50 talking about how it’s a new type of cancer movie – frank, funny, and unconventionally moving – based on the real-life cancer experiences of its screenwriter, Will Reiser. Instead, I…

THE OBJECT OF CRITICS’ AFFECTION It boils down to this: Drive is a decent film, but I find the critical adoration being heaped upon it as bordering on reactionary. It’s fun to watch a team play in its throwback uniforms one game each year, and yes, Drive’s combination of sun-tinged neo-noir, eye-contact chemistry, gear grinding…

LOVERS OF COLD WAR SPY THRILLERS OWE IT TO THEMSELVES TO SEE THE DEBT Split between two settings, two time periods, and two casts, it’s no wonder that John Madden’s The Debt divides so easily into two levels of quality. There’s one part that I like to call a classy, sexy Cold War spy thriller….

SOMEHOW, IT WORKS We’ve reached the point that a significant portion of the English-speaking world (specifically, that bankrupt, riot-helmented, penalty-kick-blowing island named England) has reduced all acting to one thing — the ability to perfect the British accent. The land of Olivier has ceased caring about things like sympathy, emotion, delivery, comic timing. They are…