“Just as a flower cannot choose its color, we are not responsible for what we’ve come to be. This is what it means to be free.” Stoker, the first English-speaking film by Korean horror-flick director Chan-wook Park (Oldboy), practically hemorrhages that kind of pretentious, dumbfoundingly meaningless writing. But it does have a dark, satisfyingly sinister Read More
Nobody really wants to see your home movies but you. Struggling actor-writer-producer-director Mark Webber would be wise to keep that in mind after the tepid reaction to his sincere but inconsequential The End of Love.
The movie stars Mr. Webber, who calls himself by his own first name, and his 2-year-old son Isaac Love, who Read More
Maybe it’s because he called Ted “creative, adorable, ingenious and devilishly, thigh-slappingly hilarious,” but our own Rex Reed made one for the history books last night by getting his own joke during the Oscar telecast. Host Seth MacFarlane, referencing Mr. Reed’s recent controversial review of Melissa McCarthy Identity Thief, told the audiences that “Rex Reed will be out here to review Adele’s performance of ‘Skyfall.’” Read More
An odd, uneasy political thriller called Inescapable is the first feature by Syrian-Canadian filmmaker Ruba Nadda since she made waves with the intriguing 2009 cross-cultural romantic interlude Cairo Time. That she has reteamed with that film’s star, the Sudanese-British actor Alexander Siddig, is good news, but the results are more of a mixed bag—well-intentioned but Read More
In Vincente Minnelli’s 1952 classic The Bad and the Beautiful–—one of the greatest films ever made about the inner workings of the Hollywood movie industry—Walter Pidgeon played a studio executive whose motto was “Bring me films that end with a kiss and black ink on the books.” Today’s films rarely end in either, but don’t Read More
With binoculars trained on revising the immigration laws in Obama’s next four years, the new focus is on China. Shanghai Calling is an interesting U.S.-Chinese co-production filled with beautiful locations and colorful characters that reverses the trend. This time, the ocean is still crowded with immigrants heading for a foreign country seeking more pay, better Read More
As Dorothy Parker used to say, “What fresh hell is this?” Goodbye, Harry Potter and the flying broomsticks at Hogwarts. Hello, lovesick witches in South Carolina. Desperately seeking the next idiotic supernatural teenage box-office bonanza to replace the hormonally challenged vampires and oversexed werewolves of the Twilight series, writer-director Richard LaGravenese has dragged out of Read More
From countless movies, books and television documentaries on the History Channel, we know about the Nazis who were rounded up and tried as war criminals after World War II, but what about the children of the Third Reich who survived? What happened to them in the eyes of the allies, the Germans and the world? This issue is illuminated in Lore, a brave, gripping, relentlessly absorbing film from Australia, shot in Germany and played entirely in German with English subtitles. It’s Australia’s deserving contender for this year’s Academy Award, for a very good reason. As a chilling footnote to the most brutal chapter in human history, and a Holocaust film unlike any other, it shows the legacy of Nazism through the eyes of innocent children in the aftermath of horror. Without the usual scenes of torture and carnage, it examines the postwar landscape of a defeated ideology with wrenching force. In Lore, the battles are fought in the hearts and minds of children so young that their only crime was to believe the lies their parents told them. Prepare to be moved to tears. Read More
How many ways can a grown person waste valuable time and lose vital I.Q. points at the same time? If you’re a movie critic, the possibilities are unlimited. And they all come together in a new chunk of junk called Identity Thief.
In the trashy, stupefying screenplay by Craig Mazin, Jason Bateman is a Denver Read More
The new movie season begins with a bang. Gangster Squad is a period piece, set in 1949, about Jewish, Brooklyn-born thug Mickey Cohen, who moved to the West Coast to rule the underworld in Los Angeles, and the clandestine six-man squad of cops assigned to bring him down. It comes equipped with the disclaimer “Inspired by Read More
