You know you’ve got a good film festival, like this year’s Virginia Film Festival, when it gives you a sense of the world seeming small and large all at once. Small for having gathered so many mini-worlds in one place; large for, well, the overall largeness they collectively imply. Bearing in mind that films made […]
The 3D re-release of Pixar’s 2003 undersea saga may or may not be a bid from director Andrew Stanton to make back some of the cash his John Carter lost at the box office. Or it may just be de rigueur for controlling partner and distributor Disney to slap a 3D stamp on its most […]
With more precision and presence of mind, Lawless might have pitched itself as an origin story of the whole gangster-movie genre. But like the transparent moonshine its backwoods brooders guzzle down in just such a way as to remind us it’s fake, the movie itself seems conspicuously diluted, more water than fire. Sourced from Matt […]
When you’re young and in love, “forever” is a word you dare to carve in tree trunks or wedding cakes. Getting older, if you’re not careful, that same word could mean a purgatory of codependence. Such is the wry wisdom of Celeste and Jesse Forever, a romantic comedy whose main characters spend the duration figuring […]
The best way to enjoy The Bourne Legacy is by not having seen the other three Bourne films. (Oops.) That way, those trilogy tidbits which play out again here, as a sort of instigating background action, won’t seem redundant but instead like alluring ads for the better and more adroitly managed movies that still await […]
The agenda of director Jay Roach’s new movie is obviously not to mine the finer nuances of American electoral procedures. This might come as a shock or a relief, depending on whether you go into The Campaign remembering Roach as the politically-minded maker of HBO’s Recount and Game Change or you only know him from […]
And so another Philip K. Dick story gets another shot at being another movie. Funny how hard it is not to go in feeling protective and skeptical, as if Paul Verhoeven’s admittedly singular Schwarzenegger staple from 1990 were some kind of inviolable masterpiece. This version, from director Len Wiseman and a complex web of writers, […]
The feature debut from writer-director Benh Zeitlin, working with playwright Lucy Alibar and a New Orleans collective, rides in on a murky flood of festival hype. And what caused that anyway? The inevitable Sundance-stamped confluence of poverty porn and indie quaintness? Wow, already this is sounding cynical, but Beasts of the Southern Wild has a […]
Do not think that just because its name was changed, the movie formerly known as Neighborhood Watch has in any way been neutered. Granted, it does have some fertility issues, even within the plot, but those were there to begin with. You can rest assured that The Watch, as it’s now called, takes the maintenance […]
No wonder Bruce Wayne retired from being Batman. Everybody wants to psychoanalyze the guy: His butler, his burglar, his nemesis, his police commissioner, and practically anyone with a hand in managing his assets. Among other things, he is accused of pretense and, perhaps worse, of “practiced apathy.” Well, it was a double identity, and a […]