Though Greta Gerwig has outlived the heyday of “mumblecore”—a genre distinguished by low budgets and a rambling discursiveness—any movie she is in seems to become as much. While Lola Versus bears many hallmarks of a more traditional romantic comedy, the actress at its center consistently carries it beyond the bounds of its own ambitions. Read More
The idea underpinning Snow White and the Huntsman is a charming one. Epic summer movies use the language of fairy tale and myth to tell stories about contemporary heroes (who are The Avengers but a bunch of Olympians?); why not cut out the middleman and make a movie about a story everyone already knows?
Unfortunately, Read More
Who really wrote William Shakespeare’s plays? Theories abound as scholars, dramaturges and researchers have accused the Bard of Avon of perpetrating a massive hoax through the centuries and boiled down the suspects. Now a lavish but somewhat tedious costume epic called Anonymous investigates each and every culprit in what often seems like double the time it must have taken to write the 37 plays, 154 sonnets and numerous collected poems of the Shakespeare oeuvre in the first place. It’s an exhausting film, but worth your stamina.
Shakespeare may be the most performed playwright in the history of letters, but in 400 years not one original script has been found in his own handwriting. When he died at 52, survived by an illiterate wife and daughter, he left behind in his will no mention of a single manuscript. In Anonymous, an obvious labor of love for director Roland Emmerich, the culprit is identified as Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, a wealthy aristocrat who could not attach his real name to works of lusty romance, tragedy and political intrigue because they lampooned prominent members of the court. Read More
There comes a time in a social worker’s life when trusting your own judgment may not be enough. For Margaret Humphreys, it came with the discovery that in order to cover up the shame and scandal of women who bore children out of wedlock during and following World War Two, the British government rounded up thousands of innocent toddlers and deported them to Australia. Devoting her life and career to opening up sealed records, pointing fingers at the guilty, exposing injustice and straightening out a tangled web of deceit that led to panic, confusion, family upheaval and years of depression in both children and parents, her efforts to repair damaged lives led to a controversial, best-selling book, “Empty Cradles”, which has now been adapted for the screen as Oranges and Sunshine. It’s uneven and flawed, but definitely worth seeing. Read More
The Skin I Live In is idiosyncratic Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s 18th film and the first in 21 years to reunite him with his discovery, Antonio Banderas, whose career he launched as the hottest Castilian export since paella. Surreal but disappointingly drab, it’s still not the best Almodovar in years. Despite the usual Almodovar plot twists, kinky sex and themes of sexual identity reversal, gender bending and mad desire, the cult auteur has gone off the tracks and lost his compass. The result is stylish, but nothing more than a derivative horror movie about plastic surgery gone berserk that recalls all those old midnight shows about mad scientists playing God with Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lionel Atwill and George Zucco. The deadly rays from their secret labs must be heating up to a red alert with so much new interest in an old genre. Read More
How many ways can a film go wrong? Too many to list, and Trespass finds them all. This pointless, unintentionally campy home-invasion thriller, directed by Joel Schumacher, is as bad as it gets, and as one dumb red herring follows another, it just gets sillier and sillier. By the end, the audience at the screening I attended was roaring with laughter. Read More
If the flaws in the American character are reflected in the politicians Americans vote for, then The Ides of March provides not only food for thought, but the analytical raw material for election-year nightmares as well. This behind-the-scenes political blowtorch hits the screen like the fire from a high-tech Uzi and forces both the right and left sides of a polarized country to rethink the electoral process. A cynical, polished and deeply disturbing look at the kind of camera-ready liberal dreamboy who gets elected in 60-second sound bites, it is one of the most important films of the year.
George Clooney is the director, co-writer and star of this biting back-room exposé of twisted ambition, betrayal and ideological disillusionment in the tradition of The Candidate and The Best Man, set during a Democratic primary debate in Ohio. Read More
The title character in Dirty Girl must have been written for Madonna. The movie is a randy romp about a road trip between a bottle blonde bimbo and a gay, overweight blob that heads for a brick wall early and stays there. Trashy, teenaged Danielle (Juno Temple) is a mess. Dressed in striped, low-cut, middy tops, killer hot pants and boots, with too much mascara and a permanent scowl only half-hidden behind huge pink-tint sunglasses, her schoolmates scoff at her behind her back, labeling her the campus slut. Easily distracted from everything but boys, slovenly about homework and indifferent to the town’s conventional ideas of morality, she’s a misfit in Norman, Okla., “back in the day.” Read More
For a superstar with unbelievable looks, charm, versatility and range, it is positively astounding how much time and energy Hugh Jackman wastes on mediocre movies. So from the previews, I dreaded Real Steel. An action flick about boxing robots? I made plans to be out of town. Well, I guess there’s no fool like an old fool. I have seen Real Steel. Get ready. It is exciting, palpitating, surprisingly fresh, action-packed, double-barreled dynamite. Read More
Trapped somewhere in the red tape of independent filmmaking between money and marketing, Anna Paquin delivers a very fine performance in the very odd starring role of a very bewildering film called Margaret. Written and directed by the excellent award-winning playwright Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me), which is one of its major draws, it was filmed in 2005, tied up for years in lawsuits, and hindered by the deaths of its two most illustrious producers, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack. Six years later and 30 minutes shorter, it is finally being released in limited runs as a 2½-hour art film that is something of a well-intentioned mess. In the time between shooting Margaret, editing it down from its original three-hour director’s cut and Anna Paquin’s emergence in True Blood, we watched her grow up from troubled teenager to vamping vampire. Some things are better off left unchanged. Read More
Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof
