Bright Star, Jane Campion’s visually luscious period romance, tells the story of poet John Keats (impish British actor Ben Whishaw), and his immortalized love affair with one-time neighbor and muse, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). The film, which derives its title from a poem Keats dedicated to Brawne (“Bright…
The moment an actor signs on to impersonate a well-known figure in a film is the moment that actor gives up any chance of delivering a naturalistic performance. To impersonate someone famous requires too many affectations of voice and manner, overwhelming the everyman quality that neorealistic acting demands.…
Adored by geeks for his stylish violence, lauded by the arthouse for his immaculate camera, and beloved by many for his Vengeance Trilogy, South Korea’s resident idiosyncratic auteur, Park Chan-wook, hit a minor misstep in his career with the 2006 romantic comedy I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK.…
Orphan is a nasty, unpleasant movie, filled with predictable plot turns, one-dimensional characters, and some really lousy dialogue — but it’s also a lot of fun. Call it a guilty pleasure, but Orphan’s unyielding commitment to capturing demented family dynamics and repressed upper-middle-class angst makes it stand out…
Modest Sundance hit The Answer Man is one of those films that seems to erase itself from your memory days after seeing it. It’s a hokey romantic comedy, a passable, easy to stomach picture that brings up some mildly interesting ruminations on faith and spirituality, but fails to explore…
The moody and intense Public Enemies is a curious picture, and it’s going to be a great divider, creating two polarized camps of love and hate. It’s paradoxically wandering and aimless and at other times fully engaging. It’s one half of a great film that sometimes becomes — as…
German actress Nina Hoss has a central role in Christian Petzold’s second feature, Jerichow, one of the best films of 2009’s first half, and now she carries Max Färberböck’s WWII picture, A Woman in Berlin. In both films Hoss finds herself mired in dangerous power-struggles with men, spurred…
To those closely following current cinema trends, it’s relatively common knowledge that when a film is tagged with the word “indie,” this label refers to a specific sub-genre, as opposed to the traditional definition, inclusive of any “independent” film. A modern indie picture usually includes characters that find…
Despite a general indifference toward Tony Scott’s taut, but largely uninspired remake of the 1974 thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, this critic will be one of the first to stand up and defend the director, and to champion some of his most critically reviled offerings.…
Pixar welcomes us back into the realm of lighter fare with Up, the esteemed animation studio’s tenth film, and, at an agreeable 90 minutes, arguably their most refined and well-paced feature to date. Last time out, Pixar explored futuristic and dystopian landscapes with WALL•E, a cautionary tale about…
State of Play has everything one would expect from a great political thriller: an all star cast, one of Hollywood’s hottest writers doing some of his best work, and a story that is relevant to the world we live in today. It features allusions to journalism films past,…
Many of cinema’s most divisive filmmakers are accused of betraying the story they’re trying to tell by utilizing various stylistic affectations. Of course, this is true of all forms of art; those who choose to break away from established formula are often ridiculed for doing so. Wes Anderson,…
Julia Roberts hasn’t been the centerpiece of a film since the moderate success Mona Lisa Smile six years ago. Distracted by kids, a new husband, and a brief foray on Broadway, Roberts has chosen her projects carefully, a rewarding decision on her part. She has, however, been steadily…
Everlasting it may not be, but, at 131 minutes, Jan Troell’s new Swedish melodrama isn’t exactly short. It plods, and it does so while telling an all-too familiar story of turbulent marital relations. Set in the Sweden of a century ago, Everlasting Moments depicts several years in the…
When you try to conjure up an image of the holocaust, what comes to mind? Maybe Schindler’s List, The Pianist, The Diary of Anne Frank, and so on — there’s a good number of highly acclaimed dramatizations of the period, but they usually all tell a similar but…
Notorious gushes with admiration for a man who was unjustly taken from the world way before his time. Writers Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo Hodari Coker deliver a screenplay clearly meant to honor the memory of the iconic hip hop artist known as The Notorious B.I.G., while director…
David Fincher has always enjoyed taking on pretty extreme, often ambitious projects. He adapted Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, a mind-bending thriller about secret underground organizations that beat the hell out of each other. And he put together an engrossing, epic procedural based on the serial killings in…