Kevin Smith is a bright guy who over the years has become a little too taken with his own persona, his own jokes, his own cult following — it’s the filmmaker’s equivalent of getting high on your own supply. No matter how awkwardly pontifical or ill-shapen his movies have gotten…
The beginning of David Mackenzie’s U.K. prison drama, Starred Up, might make you wonder if you’ll survive to the end: We see a kid with a hardeyed, shutdown face being matriculated at a new jail — apparently, he’s outgrown his old one, and so he’s been “starred up,” or prematurely…
For women especially, it’s wholly out of fashion to have sympathy for middle-aged white men. In both real life and fiction, the thinking goes, they’ve reigned supreme long enough. Who cares about their anxiety over their receding hairlines, their poochy stomachs, their inability to attract young babes? That tinny plink…
If older man/younger women matchups make many people uncomfortable, the older man/much younger women combo tends to make them apoplectic. It would be impossible for Nabokov to publish Lolita today, now that all of life, and all of art, must be arranged, categorized, and restricted as a way of protecting…
You could be forgiven, after watching the opening minutes of Ira Sachs’ fine-grained and flinty Love Is Strange, for thinking it’ll be a movie about Gay Marriage, with all the import those initial caps imply. We see two older men, clearly a couple, roll out of bed in what is…
Should grownups be spending their time reading young-adult novels, at the risk of missing the supposed riches of fiction written for actual grownups? A recent essay in Slate groused about the legions of adults who long ago graduated from the 12th grade but still devour YA fiction at the expense…
In the highly imperfect world of contemporary romantic comedies, What If is as close to perfect as anything we’ve got, not least for the way it captures the abject hopefulness of young people who’d like to be in love but don’t know how to go about it. Who does know…
Even those of us who loved Robin Williams as a performer would have to say that sometimes he was too much — too wired, too pleading, too on. There were times when I’d see him nattering away on a late-night talk show, or suffer through a performance like the one…
Lasse Hallström has become an expert at making mom-jeans movies, nonthreatening pictures in which headstrong women find love just when they think it’s too late (Once Around), take the upper hand with their cheating husbands (Something to Talk About), and turn small, French villages topsy-turvy by opening chocolate shops (Chocolat)…
Beware the movie that’s Fun! with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters that say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you’ve always liked but perhaps haven’t…
The business of childhood is the business of waiting: waiting for Christmas, waiting for school to let out, waiting to be old enough to stay up past 9. No other movie I can think of better captures the wistfulness of those days full of waiting than Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, an…
Wish I Was Here, the movie that actor and second-time director Zach Braff partially funded with money raised through Kickstarter, isn’t nearly terrible enough to satisfy all the grumblers who are hoping to see it fail. When Braff couldn’t secure traditional financing for the film, he appealed to the fan…
Wish I Was Here, the movie that actor and second-time director Zach Braff partially funded with money raised through Kickstarter, isn’t nearly terrible enough to satisfy all the grumblers who are hoping to see it fail. When Braff couldn’t secure traditional financing for the film, he appealed to the fan…
Marco Bellocchio is one of the great filmmakers of Italian cinema, and, still working at 74, he may be the greatest of those living. But his movies, when they’re released in the States at all, come and go like zephyrs. Even filmgoers who take all kinds of cinema seriously had…
Plays adapted into movies always feel naked by the time they make it to the screen, their theatrical bones showing through in a most awkward and unbecoming way. That’s more or less true of Roman Polanski’s screen version of David Ives’ Venus in Fur, in which a playwright and first-time…
To call Roger Ebert one of the great populist film critics is to damn him with faint praise. Though he took pride in working for the scrappier of the two Chicago dailies, the Sun-Times, and though we do have him to thank — or curse — for popularizing the thumbs-up/thumbs-down…
Who knows why, but the sight of apes sitting tall and proud on horseback is stirring in a primal way. That’s one of the best images in Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the sequel to the enormously successful 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes…
A truly punk act, a shout of freedom, frustration, and exaltation, hits about halfway through Lukas Moodysson’s girl-punk reverie We Are the Best! The three 13-year-old protagonists, high on the idea of the three-chord band they’ve just started, find some damp garbage bags on the street that, they discover, are…
Let’s get the obvious bit over with: The early days of the Beatles, as reflected in Richard Lester’s ebullient shout of freedom A Hard Day’s Night, were all about the optimism of the early 1960s, a thrilling and energizing time when young people, and even some older ones, truly believed…
“Destroy your safe and happy lives before it is too late,” the Mekons once sang. The smug suburban Dutch family in writer-director Alex van Warmerdam’s bleakly comic allegory Borgman never got the memo, which leaves them open to a peculiar and languorously sinister home invasion. Not even the backyard is…
Plays adapted into movies always feel naked by the time they make it to the screen, their theatrical bones showing through in a most awkward and unbecoming way. That’s more or less true of Roman Polanski’s screen version of David Ives’s Venus in Fur, in which a playwright and first-time…
Remarkable as it seems, there’s still poetry to be found in the idea of kids tooling around with nothing much to do. Whether you grew up in a small town or a midsize-to-large city, in 1962, 1982, or 2002, you probably remember getting into a car, unwisely, with the first…
