Movies
Search Options
Break It Down
A partial list of things destroyed in Roland Emmerich’s majestically shameless end-of-the-world movie 2012: The curator of the Louvre (non-accidental Parisian-tunnel car wreck). Mayan calendar cultists. The entire Los Angeles freeway system (ibid). The city of Los Angeles proper. And that's just the beginning.
Tired telepathy
On paper, The Men Who Stare at Goats sounds like a winner. As Bill Django, Jeff Bridges revisits his The Big Lebowski Dude persona to play a love-bead-draped, bearded, über-groovy alt.soldier who believes psychic communication and dancing can win hearts and minds better than guns and bombs.
God’s Will Be Done
A Serious Man is the third straight film from the Coen Brothers—after No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading—to repeat the same gag, with increasing mirth and finality: Don’t look down because there isn’t anything there.
Animal Collective
This is going to hurt you a lot more than it’s going to hurt me: Where the Wild Things Are was never one of my cherished childhood talismans. I was a nervous kid, and never embraced the idea of traveling to a land where great furry beasties could crown and/or eat me.
Couples Excrete
Early on in Couples Retreat, Vince Vaughn’s character finds himself in a housewares store, where his young son has used a toilet meant only for display. “There’s not a lot to say,” Vaughn says. That’s pretty much what it’s like to review Couples Retreat. When confronted with an exasperating, almost cute, innocently impolite public excretion, the strong temptation is just to let the act speak for itself and quickly withdraw.
Poetry In Motion
Bright Star exists at the crossroads of feminist politics and old-fashioned purity. This, it turns out, is an incredibly smoldering place. The film is likely to be admired by English professors and Oscar voters, but mark my words: It is going to become the unequaled favorite movie of evangelical colleges nationwide.
House Wins…Again
With more spark than a Frontline documentary and less pretense than whatever Michael Moore has cooking, American Casino is the best film so far to explain the US economic crisis, and the only one with an original hip-hop score about the collapse of the mortgage-backed securities market.
No Pain, No Gain
Cold Souls is the most perceptive movie ever made about the side effects of anti-depression and anti-anxiety medication, though you can scan the reviews out of New York and LA without encountering a single reference to pharmaceuticals.
Nine Times
Nine points regarding Shane Acker's film, 9. Just be careful not to get bogged down in all the deep pseudo-symbology.
Back to Work
The movies of the American workplace would be worse off without the skeptical empathy of writer-director Mike Judge. It’s not that Judge is any kind of labor-relations expert, or even a cinematic genius. It’s just that he knows what it’s like to have to work for a living and how that knowledge might well be channeled into diverting entertainment.
