By Rex Reed 10/30/12 5:23pm

movies

Washington in Flight.

Cruise Control: With Denzel and Zemeckis in the Cockpit, Flight Takes Off and Soars at Full Throttle

Denzel Washington is such a sturdy, reliable actor that his name on the screen has become synonymous with that of hero (with the obvious exception of Training Day). So it’s hard to buy him as a doped-up, alcoholic heel in Flight, an edgy thriller about the responsibility—and inherent culpability—of commercial pilots entrusted with the lives of millions.  I’d place my trust in Denzel in the cockpit any old day while humming “Fly Me to the Moon” at the same time. So it’s not easy to accept him as one of the irresponsible jerks who dangle their passengers in harm’s way. You just sort of trust him to do the right thing, and when he finally does, after more than two hours of soul-searching and moral hand-wringing, you might, like me, have double trouble with plausibility. So I have some minor problems with Flight. But don’t let that deter you. It’s the first film in over a decade by director Robert Zemeckis that guarantees originality, tempo and thrills. You go away satisfied and up to your eyeballs in entertainment.  Read More

By Rex Reed 10/23/12 7:51pm

movies

Tosar in Sleep Tight.

Sleep Tight, Don’t Let The Doorman Bite: This Everyday Joe Will Have You Reaching for the Dead-Bolt

Sleep Tight is a creepy—but highly effective and superbly made—horror movie from Spain in which the monster is spine-tinglingly human. The logo in the ads reads “Someone Is Watching Over You,” and they’re not just whistling Vaya Con Dios. Set in an otherwise upscale apartment building in Barcelona, everything looks inviting. It’s the doorman you want to beware of.

The keeper of the keys—who goes bump in the night, in more ways than one—is César (Luis Tosar). As the super as well as the concierge, he’s privy to the needs, secrets and problems of every tenant in the building—and victim to all their complaints. He feeds their dogs. He changes their locks. He fixes their plumbing. It’s time to get even. Read More

By Rex Reed 10/23/12 7:47pm

movies

A wedding at Lake Qarga, Kabul, in The Black Tulip.

Full Bloom: A Light Shines Through as The Black Tulip Blossoms Amidst Harsh Censorship and Brutal Rule by the Taliban

Afghanistan has no film industry, which makes a new movie called The Black Tulip, about good people seeking some kind of normal life in modern Kabul despite the constant threat of violence, destruction and despair, doubly dangerous to have made and inestimably valuable to watch. Filmed entirely in a country where women’s rights are still tested daily and cameras are so verboten that even a tourist’s throwaway Instamatic is an invitation to trouble—and produced, written and directed by a woman, no less!—this is a gripping experience as politically enlightening and emotionally involving as it is educational and beautiful to look at.  Read More

By Rex Reed 10/23/12 7:46pm

movies

Jim Broadbent and Hanks in Cloud Atlas. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Atlas, Drugged: This Colossal Misuse of Cast, Crew and Cash Unceremoniously Collapses in on Itself

Almost three hours long, a lugubrious sludge of mud soup called Cloud Atlas deserves a limp nod for pure guts, I suppose, but what I’d really like to do is burn it. Based on a genre-switching, era-hopping, style-abusing, tempo-thumping novel by David Mitchell that everyone has always labeled “unfilmable,” the labyrinthine, ridiculously bloated—$100-million, anybody?—head-scratcher of a movie is the mess that proves it.

Coming at us in sections like an exploding garbage truck, this adaptation is a single film that weaves an incomprehensible literary gumbo of unrelated stories in multiple time frames over a span of 500 years. Whew! Read More

By Rex Reed 10/16/12 7:23pm

movies

Bedos, Richard, Fonda, Rich and Chaplin in All Together.

Aging, Gracefully: Quel Plaisir! All Together is ‘a Sweet, Thoughtful and Spirited Examination of How to Grow Old’

Jane Fonda’s first French-speaking film in 40 years finds her leading a joyous ensemble of septuagenarians in a sweet, thoughtful and spirited examination of how to grow old with dignity and pride in a regrettable era when senior citizens have been reduced to the status of a political agenda. At 74, Ms. Fonda is a testament to the benefits of exercise, the stimulation of cognitive effort, up-to-the-minute cosmetics, a healthy lifestyle—and the money to afford them all. She is glorious at any age, in any language, and is a class act on the screen who is always welcome.  Read More

By Rex Reed 10/16/12 7:10pm

movies

Thirlby in Nobody Walks.

Ants in Your Pants: Nobody Walks is a Convoluted On-Screen Orgy That Doesn’t Arouse

The last film by novice indie director Ry Russo-Young was an empty bottle called You Won’t Miss Me, about an alienated 23-year-old misfit just released from a psychiatric hospital. Her new film, Nobody Walks, is an empty bottle about an alienated 23-year-old misfit from New York who is making a video about insects for her art thesis. She seems to have a thing for 23-year-old misfits. Too bad she can’t find a way to make a movie about them that will keep anyone awake. Co-written by Lena Dunham, whose TV sitcom Girls is another guaranteed cure for insomnia, Nobody Walks is 82 minutes long—and I was snoozing 30 minutes in. This is not good for anyone anxious to build a reputation or entertain an audience.  Read More

By Rex Reed 10/09/12 8:08pm

movies

The Bellhop Rings Twice: Hardboiled Throwback Hotel Noir Aims for Nostalgia—Result is a Big Sleep

I’m all for refurbishing film noir and all the private eyes in trench coats, redheads in silk dressing gowns, sweaty weirdos chain-smoking unfiltered Camels and revolvers with silencers that go with it. But Hotel Noir, written and directed by Sebastian Gutierrez, is too stylistically derivative of Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Jean-Pierre Melville and Paramount B-movie hacks on the studio’s payroll (like George Marshall and Frank Tuttle) to smack of anything fresh and original, and too pokey and pedantic to keep you awake. It was filmed entirely inside the old Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles in 15 days for less than $300,000, so such luxuries as period cars, exotic locations and noirish Art Deco sets were out of the question—and it looks it. Neither a fogbound Alan Ladd crime picture nor a clever parody like Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, it lurks somewhere in the shadows in between. They aimed for Raymond Chandler and ended up with Mickey Spillane.

Still, the cast is worth watching, and it’s clear that Mr. Gutierrez loves the genre. Read More

By Rex Reed 10/09/12 8:01pm

movies

Affleck in Argo.

Affleck, Duck!: Ben’s Real-Life Spy Thriller, Argo, is Spooky Good

It’s rare as a pink giraffe, but every once in a blue moon a movie comes along in which each piece fits seamlessly and every detail works. Argo is one of them. I have come to regard Ben Affleck as better, stronger and more self-assured behind a camera than he is in front of one, but in this exemplary, meticulously detailed thriller about a fake movie that saved real lives, he wears both hats magnificently. The result is a movie that defines perfection.

Gifted, intelligent and full of cogent ideas, Mr. Affleck can almost always be depended on to come up with something fascinating, coherent and thoroughly cinematic. Argo, his third feature film as a director after Gone Baby Gone (2007) and The Town (2010), is no exception. It grabbed me by the lapels and held my attention for two solid hours without a sideward glance, and I can’t wait to see it again. You have to see it twice if you want to absorb the myriad pieces of a jigsaw too fantastic to accept as fact, although we know going in that the recently declassified records of an amazing history lesson prove otherwise. This movie is not only true, but unbelievably true.  Read More

By Rex Reed 10/09/12 7:56pm

movies

Harrelson and Walken in Seven Psychopaths.

Going to the Dogs: With Seven Psychopaths, The Once-Masterful McDonagh Stays Bent on an Ill-Advised Hiatus from Theater

Garbage comes in all sizes, and every one of them seems to fit into a load of violent, hateful and incomprehensible trash called Seven Psychopaths. Written by talented Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who shocked Broadway audiences with dark, funny, gothic creepshows like The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Cripple of Inishmaan and A Behanding in Spokane,this movie is proof that moving to Hollywood is poisonous Kool-Aid to the creative process. Kneeling at the trough of Hollywood pop psychobabble that has come to symbolize the New Cinema, Mr. McDonagh seems to have taken leave (temporarily, I hope) of his senses. He proved in 2008, with a brooding job called In Bruges, about hit men on holiday in Belgium, that he cannot stretch his bristling ideas into one full-length feature. Unfortunately, he also thinks he’s a director—a job for which he shows no patience, aptitude or proficiency. The result is a twitching convulsion of vicious drivel passing itself off as a movie, which can be best appreciated by the kind of people who dig Showgirls, the Saw franchise and Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman flicks.

For starters, the title means nothing. Read More

By Rex Reed 10/02/12 8:02pm

movies

McConaughey and Efron in The Paperboy.

Swampwater: The Paperboy Is a Long Way Off His Route In This Sunburnt Adaptation

One by one, the punishments suffered last month at the Toronto film circus are arriving to pollute the screens at home. Next week, get ready for a diabolical torture called Seven Psychopaths. For now, avoid at all costs a trash-wallow about sex and inbred Southern racism called The Paperboy. The director is Lee Daniels, who shocked and turned off a sizeable portion of the public three years ago with Precious. Maybe shock for the sake of nothing else is what he stands for, but regardless of what you thought about his disturbing feature debut, it was light years ahead of The Paperboy. This raunchy dreck, cut from the same disposable toilet tissue as the recent trailer-trash creepfest Killer Joe, is a leap downhill from Precious.

A transcendentally awful slab of chicken-fried camp replete with Nicole Kidman urinating on the near-naked body of Zac Efron, The Paperboy was booed in Cannes, laughed down in Toronto and inserted in the New York Film Festival for no other purpose than to stir up controversy. It has no place in any of them. Read More