Grim, unfocused and depressing without much fluid movement and alarmingly lacking in any kind of necessary insight on the subject of mental illness, Helen is a drab waste of time-and at two hours, plenty of it.... MORE >
In the maelstrom of muck that passes itself as filmmaking today, it is reassuring to come across the occasional gem made by genuine talents who still know how to tell a classic story with coherence and charm. The aura of William Faulkner lingers over Get Low, a chunk of down-home rural Southern folklore based on a real event in 1938, when a Tennessee hermit emerged after decades of hiding in the woods to hear... MORE >
The Extra Man is a hapless fiasco about Louis Ives, a nerdy Princeton meathead with a penchant for wearing women's lingerie who travels to Manhattan looking for adventure, answers a roommate-wanted ad, and moves into a rabbit warren decorated with Christmas tree ornaments occupied by Harry Harrison, a fading gigolo and a penniless, eccentric playwright whose masterpiece was stolen by a hunchback. Louis is played by Paul Dano, a catatonic young actor with all... MORE >
Zac Efron, the impossibly beautiful young Ben and Jerry's confection who is doing everything humanly possible to grow from Flavor of the Year to Force of the Future, stands head and shoulders above most of his peers in the get-famous business. I didn't see the High School Musicals that catapulted him to teenage royalty, but he showed real range and dedication to craft in the underrated Me and Orson Welles. Promise now turns to... MORE >
Salt is not a cautionary tale about the dangers of high blood pressure from too much sodium. No, it's just another entry in the flaky, forgettable farrago of predictable action thrillers in a particularly brainless summer, this time starring Angelina Jolie as a C.I.A. operative named Evelyn Salt, who may or may not be a double agent working both sides of the fence.... MORE >
"It's good to be with someone who isn't weird, or screwed up, or sicko pervy," says Allison Janney in Life During Wartime. Obviously, she is not talking about her director, Todd Solondz. Only the brave or genuinely perverse ever get through his offbeat films. A favorite of film festival eccentrics but studiously avoided and ignored by the general public, he makes movies about dysfunctional suburbanites who cry out for compassion and sympathy without earning... MORE >
The best film of the week is Spoken Word, a small, unpretentious and heartfelt family drama directed by the esteemed filmmaker Victor Nunez, who guided Peter Fonda to such glory in Ulee's Gold (1997). This time he introduces Kuno Becker, a charismatic actor from Mexico City with extensive credits in his native country but who is relatively unknown in the U.S., as a "spoken word" artist named Cruz Montoya.... MORE >
From Ireland comes Kisses, a poignant little film about two abused runaways who spend Christmas night living by their wits on the streets of Dublin, learning by trial and error to depend on each other after they are rejected by the cruel adult world. Dylan (Shane Curry) is an 11-year-old with asthma whose older brother ran away two years earlier to escape their vicious father. His younger neighbor Kylie (Kelly O'Neill), living in a... MORE >
In Valhalla Rising, Mads Mikkelsen, the imposing Danish actor who made a sizable impact as James Bond's villainous adversary in Casino Royale and again as a sexy, forceful Igor Stravinsky in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, now essays a new kind of leading role-as a tattooed, one-eyed mute enslaved by a vicious warlord to kill off enemy tribes in bare-knuckle combat.... MORE >
At the movies, incomprehensible gibberish has become a way of life, but it usually takes time before it's clear that a movie really stinks. Inception, Christopher Nolan's latest assault on rational coherence, wastes no time. It cuts straight to the chase that leads to the junkpile without passing go, although before it drags its sorry butt to a merciful finale, you'll be desperately in need of a "Get Out of Jail Free"... MORE >
Movie lesbians have come a long way since Shirley MacLaine committed suicide over Audrey Hepburn in The Children's Hour. Now we have Annette Bening married to Julianne Moore in Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, with two teenage children and a pickup truck. They're not perfect parents and this is not a perfect movie, but boy does it vibrate. No pun... MORE >
Helen Mirren is no stranger to slumming (does anyone remember a pornographic historical abortion called Caligula?), but after winning an Academy Award for playing the Queen of England, she does her loyal subjects no favors stooping to the lurid role of a salty Nevada madam with Dolly Parton's hair in the cheesy Love Ranch. Equally lamentable is the way it wastes the skills of her husband, director Taylor Hackford, whom she met on the... MORE >
In a world of disposable vocabulary, the word "Mumblecore" has been invented. It means semi-improvised anti-establishment (i.e. studio financed) movies about the youth culture, centering on post-college drifters who wander aimlessly looking for relationships, signifying nothing and mumbling all the way.... MORE >
Tilda Swinton has played so many men and androgynous freaks that it's a treat to see her emerge from her self-effacing cocoon as a creature of ravishing feminine allure in a lush Italian saga of love, liberation and changing social upheaval called I Am Love. In glamorous clothes, makeup and hair styles, she looks like she's having the time of her life. Elegantly directed and exquisitely photographed, the movie is a triumph, and so... MORE >
I don't pretend to understand movie audiences under 30 with an ever-growing lust for blood, bowels, vomit and torture. But they'll get plenty of it all in an apocalyptic view of toxic humanity called The Killer Inside Me, another sweaty, feverish adaptation of visceral pulp fiction by the nihilistic gonzo writer Jim Thompson, who was not labeled "the dime-store Dostoevsky" for nothing.... MORE >
