The latest offering from esteemed Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli (Ponyo, Spirited Away) comes to American audiences courtesy of Disney, and that seems like a win-win arrangement. The Secret World of Arrietty is a collaboration between Disney and Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli based on the children’s book series The Borrowers. (Disney) The Secret World […]
A George Moore novella from 1927, and an off-Broadway Glenn Close vehicle several decades later, Albert Nobbs has at last arrived on the big screen, with all the breathtaking historical sweep of a gender-studies curriculum
Safe House seems like as good a name as any for a movie with the apathetic tagline “No One Is Safe,” although it doesn’t quite nail the derivative-jittery-spy-thriller vibe. If only this thing weren’t so earnest, it might have the good self-spoofing grace to say what it really is: The Bourne I Wannabe. In Safe House, […]
Meet Joe Carnahan, survivalist. Drop this guy unprotected into the lethal tundra of a January release slot and what does he do? Turns it into $20 million, an opening weekend’s top box-office take. Could any other director seem so right for a movie about a group of bruiser oil drillers led by Liam Neeson starving, […]
The latest Meryl Streep showpiece of biographical impersonation is not a Marvel Comics property, mercifully, but a portrait of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who took that office, as the first woman ever to do so, in 1979. Meryl Streep was nominated for a best actress Oscar for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher […]
Adapted from the 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close evokes the recent literary wave of self–conscious precocity probably begun with Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Such titles, stacking up adjectives and adverbs like stones in fortress walls, have a common angle on grappling with grief: the will to outthink it. […]
His name is George Smiley, and he works for the Circus. It’s less fun than it sounds. The time is the early 1970s, the place is London, and the Circus is what Smiley (Gary Oldman) and his colleagues (including David Dencik, Colin Firth, Ciarán Hinds and Toby Jones) call the British Secret Intelligence Service, within […]
As director Alexander Payne’s movies have migrated westward geographically—from the Nebraska of Citizen Ruth, Election, and About Schmidt to California’s Central Coast for Sideways, to Hawaii for The Descendants—his edge has considerably softened.
Where biography is concerned, movies are eminently unreliable. Portraiture is another matter—more beholden to personal expression than to fact, and maybe also more movie-conducive. My Week with Marilyn is not the place to go for a credible biography of Marilyn Monroe, but didn’t we already know that, and wouldn’t something else be nicer anyway? The […]
The main draw of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher Edition, is that we want to see what this director will do with it, although we can sort of guess that the crucial thing he’ll do is make a ton of money. Brutal and mesmerizing, David Finsher’s adaptation of The Girl with the […]