Have you heard about those MIT researchers who invented a camera that records a trillion frames per second, literally reducing the speed of light to mind-boggling slow motion? More importantly, has Guy Ritchie heard? Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law reprise the roles of Holmes and Watson in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, director […]
Desperate neither to declare the wonderments of digital 3D nor to debunk them, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo does have some preaching to do, on the director’s pet subject of film preservation. Magnanimously, Scorsese won’t say outright that today’s algorithm-rendered pseudo-epics have nothing on the blood, sweat and practical effects of the very old school. It’s all of a […]
It will require a certain disposition to see it as such, but in a way, writer-director Lars von Trier’s gloriously glum, robustly romantic new film Melancholia is the perfect post-Thanksgiving movie. It’s the anti-Muppets. Kirsten Dunst received the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress award for her performance in Melancholia, director Lars von Trier’s latest beautiful […]
“I remember you from my seminar at UVA. You grilled me pretty hard, as I recall, on the bureau’s civil rights record in the Hoover years. I gave you an A.” Leonardo DiCaprio plays the revered and reviled J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood’s latest biopic on the man who ran the FBI for […]
If unremitting festival buzz about writer-director Sean Durkin’s first feature counts as anything
Tower Heist is one of those movies whose duration seems allusively equivalent to the time required for researching and pondering the previous credits of its several screenwriters, who are collectively responsible for cheeky caper flicks of widely varied pedigree.
In The Rum Diary, a suavely scruffy American novelist (Johnny Depp) takes a reporting gig at a shabby newspaper in Puerto Rico, where he contends with various kooky colleagues (Michael Rispoli, Richard Jenkins, Giovanni Ribisi), a smug and greedy land developer (Aaron Eckhart), a luscious love interest (Amber Heard), and several angry locals. Also, he […]
“Strange visitor with assimilation challenge shakes up status quo.” We could be talking about Footloose. But instead it’s The Thing, another recently refreshed early ’80s movie memory. It’s a timelessly simple story: Researchers in Antarctica discover a hostile shapeshifting extraterrestrial in their midst—and hoo boy, can this thing dance! No? O.K. For now, being able […]
Drive is a movie about sexy people and cars. Or maybe not cars, per se, but the experience of being in them, with sexy people. As such, it is ridiculous, but not in the way you’d expect: It’s neither all that fast nor especially furious. Oh sure, there is some grisly gun violence, and a […]
For a striving young screenwriter, which is the worse break: being Paul Reiser’s cousin, or randomly getting cancer? Will Reiser is two for two, and some people will be wondering whether he really deserves to have a movie made about his life. 50/50 is a funny movie, and an honest one.