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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.
The Lols of War
In the Loop offers a deliciously corrosive backstage view of the Iraq War years, as Brits and Yanks danced around what they knew was a foregone conclusion of their own making.
Triumph Of The Reel
Inglourious Basterds ranks among Tarantino’s greatest achievements, but it is not a shiny summer bauble. It is more like a house cat hunting for 152 minutes, depositing a bloody, broken bird at your feet and expecting you to love it.
