A Not-Quite-Satisfying Look At A Notorious Career In Crime
Many years ago I taught a course in the sociology of deviance to a class of fledgling Boston-Irish policemen. I enjoyed them enormously because they didn't write down everything I said and cough it...
View ArticleTrudging Uphill With Two Men And The Weight Of History
With or without his knighthood, the legendary climber Sir Edmund Hillary stood 6-foot-plus in his stockinged feet and looked a bit like a mountain crag himself.
View Article'Land Ho!' Takes An Agreeable Stroll Through Familiar And Unfamiliar Terrain
In a more market-driven neighborhood of the movie business, Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz's comedy about two retired gents let loose on Iceland would surely be released under the title Geezers Do...
View Article'The Notebook': A Grim Fable Of Cruelty In Wartime
At first blush, the Hungarian film The Notebook (no relation, trust me, to that other Notebook) seems to be gearing up as a standard World War II weepie with clumsy plotting. It's 1944; the war is...
View ArticleIn 'Rocks In My Pockets,' A Family History Of Depression And Art
In Rocks In My Pockets, a lively animated documentary billed (a touch reductively) as "a funny film about depression," Latvian-American Signe Baumane describes in detail one of her several attempts to...
View ArticleGetting Each Other And The Bonds Of 'The Skeleton Twins'
Working back through a raft of bad-seed twins to 1962's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? the sibling drama has, with few exceptions, been ignored or pathologized to death in movies. I see why: no...
View ArticleCrossing The Desert, Making 'Tracks'
Scenic and a touch bloodless, Tracks is a tastefully off-Hollywood version of the upcoming Wild. Wild is bound to make a lot more noise, and not just because it has Reese Witherspoon in the lead as a...
View ArticleGood-Hearted But Simplistic, 'The Good Lie' Fails To Satisfy
I feel like a churl for voicing qualms about The Good Lie, a big, eager puppy of an issue movie that plants its paws on your chest and licks away at your cheek in eager expectation of praise. The story...
View ArticleBill Murray Doesn't Do Much, But He Does It So Well In 'St. Vincent'
The grumpy geezer Bill Murray plays in Ted Melfi's gentle comedy St. Vincent is not exactly a stretch. Vincent is a down-on-his-luck gent festering in a falling-down row house on the butt end of...
View ArticleBeauty And Loss In 'The Tale Of Princess Kaguya'
My first encounter with the lovely 10th-century Japanese folktale The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter was in the Sesame Street special Big Bird Goes to Japan. A kind and beautiful young woman named...
View ArticleIn 'Force Majeure,' Society Crumbles Under An Avalanche
Off to the side of the wickedly funny Swedish black comedy Force Majeure lurks a minor but significant figure with a sour, slightly saturnine face. The man is a cleaner in a fancy French Alps ski hotel...
View Article'Before I Go To Sleep' Is An Amnesia Thriller You'll Hope To Forget
The bloodshot eyeball that opens to greet a brand-new day — and I mean brand-new day — in the thriller Before I Go To Sleep belongs to wealthy English homemaker Christine Lucas (Nicole Kidman)....
View ArticleIn 'The Homesman,' A Most Unromantic American West
Hilary Swank is a real looker in ways that tend not to get her cast in what the industry is pleased to call "women's pictures." She has seized the day to snag all manner of bracingly offbeat roles, the...
View ArticleA Frustrating Love Letter In 'Monk With A Camera'
In the late 1970s, a young American took leave of his well-heeled, cosmopolitan life to become a Tibetan monk in a remote Indian monastery. Given the times, this was hardly an unusual step, especially...
View ArticleIn 'The Babadook,' A Mother's Sacrifices And A Monster's Roar
Fun though it is that women in American film have begun to dip their fingers into the macabre genres, they're way behind Australia's curve.
View ArticleA Claustrophobic 'Pioneer' From A Land Suddenly Grown Rich
Given the times, the Norwegian thriller Pioneer is hardly the first thriller in recent memory todelve into the poisonous fallout from a nation's suddenly acquired wealth. But it may be the first to...
View ArticleThe 1970s, Ugly And Adrift In 'Inherent Vice'
Paul Thomas Anderson probably wouldn't take kindly to being called a period filmmaker. And it's true that one of our finest pulse-takers of the American predicament is so much more than that....
View ArticleA Beautiful, Desolate 'Winter Sleep'
My favorite movie of 2014 is three hours long, and it's about Turkish people who live in caves. Winter Sleep is all talk and vistas of steppes so beautiful and so desolate, they'll make you weep. Don't...
View Article'Leviathan' Shows A Film And Filmmaker Unafraid Of Big Questions
In Leviathan, Andrey Zvyagintsev's melodrama about a motor mechanic's desperate struggle to hang on to home and family in the New Russia, a photograph of Vladimir Putin gazes impassively down from a...
View Article'Mommy' Tells The Story Of A Troubled, Transfixing Bond
At first blush, Diane (Anne Dorval), the working-class, French-Canadian woman in her forties who dominates Xavier Dolan's Mommy, seems no more than a tired movie cliché, the single-mom slattern who...
View Article
