Betsy Sharkey, Film Critic
8:00 PM PDT, March 28, 2013
Review: In 'The Place Beyond the Pines,' society is the bad guy
Violence is the trigger in "The Place Beyond the Pines," Derek Cianfrance's latest love letter to bad breaks. But it's the ripple effect of responsibility, regret, limited resources and guilt that makes "Pines" particularly relevant in a time when so many struggle from paycheck to paycheck.
3:54 PM PDT, March 28, 2013
Review: 'The Host' limps along as alien tale fails to generate heat
"Twilight's" creator Stephenie Meyer clearly has a few obsessions she can't quite shake: interspecies romance, love triangles and color-coded eyes — red-rimmed if vampires are involved, silver for the sci-fi aliens of "The Host."
5:15 PM PDT, March 27, 2013
Review: Rescue mission needed for 'G.I. Joe: Retaliation'
Who, oh who, will save the Joes while they're out saving the world?
5:13 PM PST, March 7, 2013
Review: 'Dead Man Down' twists itself into knots
Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace star as two damaged souls in "Dead Man Down," a moody twist of hyper-violent vengeance and heartache where death is hand-delivered, mercy is hard to come by and love is never easy.
March 8, 2013
Movie review: 'Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters' of art in progress
It is a rare thing to witness the creative process. But in the excellent new documentary "Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters," filmmaker Ben Shapiro gives us fly-on-the-wall access over a 10-year period to an acclaimed artist as he envisions, designs and executes his surreal commentary on small-town American life in the form of an epic photo installation, "Beneath the Roses."
3:51 PM PDT, March 21, 2013
Review: 'The Croods' lacks a spark of fire
It's not a good omen for "The Croods," about a likable family of Paleolithic cave dwellers, when a joke about "the first joke" falls flat.
5:12 PM PST, March 7, 2013
Review: 'Emperor' has misplaced priorities
The scene is a devastated Japan, August 1945, as "Emperor," the new historical drama starring Matthew Fox and Tommy Lee Jones, begins. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are little more than smoking rubble and stone-faced survivors. Emperor Hirohito has officially surrendered but remains protected behind palace walls.
4:20 PM PST, February 28, 2013
Review: Park Chan-Wook's 'Stoker' twists the knife on twisted tale
What would happen if a psychopath fell for a sociopath? The short answer in "Stoker" is people die. The longer answer in the new thriller from South Korean director Park Chan-Wook is a bizarrely perverse, beautifully rendered mystery that you may or may not care to solve.
6:35 PM PST, February 28, 2013
Review: 'Koch' shows that the mayor's great love was New York
What an entertaining rapscallion Ed Koch was during his run as mayor of New York in the late '70s and '80s. Popular, polarizing, loved, hated, even 20-plus years after he left office, he never failed to attract a crowd as he walked the streets of the city. Which he did virtually every day until he died at 88, ironically on Feb. 1, the very day Neil Barsky's documentary chronicling his life and his legacy hit New York City theaters.
3:45 PM PST, February 25, 2013
Oscars winners 2013: Jennifer Lawrence is just hitting her stride
It's hard to believe that it was only two years ago that Jennifer Lawrence, at 20, was in the running for her first Oscar. As Ree in "Winter's Bone," Lawrence cut a swath through the bloody Ozark mountains that no one will soon forget. The film, and her Oscar nomination, was an extraordinary coming-out party.
February 22, 2013
Critic's Pick: 'Tristana' a lesson in rule breaking
Sometimes it seems as if the only collective memory of the great Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel is that startling close-up of a razor slicing through an eye. It was in "Un Chien Andalou," his first film, a collaboration with another legendary Spanish surrealist, Salvador Dali. Released in 1929 and only 16 minutes long, the images — bizarre and dangerous — still rattle the sensibility.
10:30 AM PST, February 25, 2013
Christoph Waltz was a crucial link in 'Django's' chain
He wasn't the favorite. His name was barely mentioned in all the Oscar buzz. But Christoph Waltz was indeed the best.
6:00 AM PST, February 24, 2013
Essay: 'Amour' is a horror film for the ages
There is no cabin in the woods or scary house at the end of the street in "Amour." There is no ax-wielding Jack Nicholson running around. Yet filmmaker Michael Haneke's examination of the final days of a long life — and a long love — may be the quintessential horror film for our times. It has a remarkable ability to scare the living daylights out of audiences of any age.
3:20 PM PST, February 14, 2013
Review: 'Happy People: A Year in the Taiga' shows culture frozen in time
Serendipity is what gives us "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga," an intimate portrait of the vanishing breed of hunters and fishers still making a life in the isolated heart of Siberia, where a mild winter day is 30-below and the only way in or out is by helicopter or boat.
11:15 AM PST, February 25, 2013
Oscars winners 2013: Anne Hathaway did it her way
This one gives me pause. Anne Hathaway is a fine young actress. The dignity and humility with which she comports herself off-screen is admirable and has made her an academy favorite.
9:30 AM PST, February 25, 2013
Oscars winners 2013: Daniel Day-Lewis was favorite to end on top
Of course Mr. Lincoln, um, I mean Daniel Day-Lewis, deserved the Oscar. Finally, after countless iterations of the 16th U.S. president on television, film and stage, it feels as if we know the man himself.
February 22, 2013
Review: Too much talk and not enough action in 'Snitch'
If you believe the trailers, "Snitch," the new crime drama starring Dwayne Johnson, is a jampacked action thriller. His weapon of choice: a giant snarling big rig, all the better to run the bad guys down. But what the movie is really about is a war-on-drugs tactic that offers early release to convicts willing to snitch on someone else.
February 22, 2013
Review: 'Inescapable' is full of flaws
"Inescapable" is like "Taken" without the tension.
8:00 AM PST, February 15, 2013
Critic's Notebook: Movie violence must not be stopped
I abhor violence. As a rookie police reporter years ago I saw the damage guns, knives, broken bottles, metal pipes, hands — humans — can inflict. From the terrifyingly premeditated to the unfortunately accidental, those images still have the power to shake me to the core. They will never leave me.
5:59 PM PST, February 13, 2013
Movie review: 'Beautiful Creatures' has brains and bewitching cast too
Maybe there really are supernatural forces at work in this world. How else to explain "Beautiful Creatures"? The movie is an intriguing, intelligent enigma — three words not typically associated with teen romances.
5:12 PM PST, February 13, 2013
Review: 'Safe Haven' can't find refuge from a cheesy story
"Safe Haven," the latest weepie from a Nicholas Sparks novel, takes close to two hours to get where it's going — the intersection of Lovers Lane and nowhere. Starring Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel, this sloppy sentimental journey is long on beauty shots, short on depth and seriously intent on tugging your heartstrings. Indeed, it demands you reach for those tissues. Sob.
5:25 PM PST, February 7, 2013
Review: Laughs stolen in 'Identity Thief'
"Identity Thief" is a larcenous bit of funny business. It probably should be locked up for its crimes and misdemeanors against moviemaking.
7:30 AM PST, February 1, 2013
Oscar-nominated short films a mixed and marvelous bag
The experience of watching five short animation or live-action films in one sitting — each a finalist for an Oscar in two of this year's shorts categories — can be a bit like walking into a museum to find the Rothko's been hung next to the Monet. It's not unpleasant, just unexpected.
9:00 PM PST, February 7, 2013
Review: 'Mondays at Racine' heads documentary short films field
Trials and tribulations in myriad forms are at the center of all five Oscar-nominated documentary short films this year. There are two very different but incisive cuts at the country's homeless problem in "Inocente" and "Redemption," a beautiful breast cancer story in "Mondays at Racine," "Open Heart's" moving look at Rwandan children with heart disease, and finally, "King's Point's" candid examination of the social and physical strains in a Florida retirement "resort."
2:13 PM PST, January 24, 2013
Review: 'Tabu' loses its power to the silent-film past
"Tabu," the third film from rising Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, feels like a relic of the past and not merely because of its aesthetic nod to silent film great F.W. Murnau's final project.
1:41 PM PST, January 10, 2013
Review: 'Gangster Squad' runs through its ammo to no avail
The new crime thriller "Gangster Squad," with its swell cast led by Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn and Emma Stone, tries to capture mob-infested Los Angeles circa 1949, when Hollywood glam ruled the Strip, wiseguys took aim with tommy guns and fedoras were all the rage.
3:32 PM PST, January 17, 2013
Review: 'Broken City' loses its way
Brian Tucker's "Broken City" screenplay is packed with plot twists, complex sentences and the kind of innuendo that make it seem as if the movie will be a smarter-than-most thriller from the first exchanges. All the talking is no doubt why "Broken City" landed on the coveted Black List of the best unproduced scripts a few years ago.
7:00 AM PST, January 14, 2013
Jodie Foster delivers a jolt from the heart
I will take Jodie Foster's 6 minutes and 40 seconds of unfiltered passion, confusion, confession and love, so much love, over anything else anyone in Hollywood has said in a very, very long time.
12:22 PM PST, December 20, 2012
Review: 'Jack Reacher' is too much of a stretch for Tom Cruise
In "Jack Reacher," the new thriller starring Tom Cruise, the crime that draws the film's reclusive ex-Army investigator out of the shadows — a sniper gunning down people on a city street — couldn't have been a worse one to land in theaters just days after the horror of the Connecticut elementary school massacre (the studio delayed the film's release in the area).
December 14, 2012
Review: 'Any Day Now' a tangled love story
I've gotten so used to seeing Alan Cumming as high-end attorney Eli Gold, fighting cerebral battles for a compromised politician on CBS' "The Good Wife," that he's almost unrecognizable as the vamping drag queen in "Any Day Now."
December 14, 2012
Review: 'Stand Up Guys' stars liven up trio of aging mob guys
Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin star in "Stand Up Guys," a buddy comedy about a trio of wise guys coming out of retirement for one last roll of the dice.
11:00 AM PST, December 14, 2012
Best movies of 2012: 'Pi,' 'Master,' 'Moonrise Kingdom' make cut
It's as if this year filmmakers remembered why God made movies. In a world of nonstop data where most of the static is gossip in 140 soul-destroying words or less, cinema has had a transcendent 12 months — a visual renaissance that has burned past convention.
6:26 PM PST, December 6, 2012
Movie review: 'Lay the Favorite' a bad bet
What has happened to director Stephen Frears?
4:30 PM PST, December 6, 2012
Review: 'Playing for Keeps' scores a few points for Gerard Butler
The idea underlying "Playing for Keeps," the new romantic comedy starring Gerard Butler, is basic: A well-toned guy who is good with kids is the ultimate aphrodisiac for sex-starved soccer moms. Three very good actresses are squandered to prove the point.
6:34 PM PST, December 6, 2012
Review: 'Deadfall' runs hot and cold
Like the deer in the headlights that opens the thriller "Deadfall," this is a film about the tragic consequences of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bad roads, bad weather, bad family dynamics are equally problematic. And when Olivia Wilde's lost girl Liza says, "You don't want to take me home," well, that should not be taken lightly.
6:46 PM PST, November 8, 2012
Review: 'Bones Brigade' rides a skateboard back to the '80s
Skateboarding legend Stacy Peralta's latest documentary, "Bones Brigade: An Autobiography," is like a high school reunion, filled with affectionate memories of an earlier, more innocent, time.
5:49 PM PDT, November 1, 2012
Review: 'A Late Quartet' is set to Opus 131 but doesn't match it
C-sharp minor — the mere words conjure up a sense of anxious edge, which is the feeling that drives "A Late Quartet." Starring Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir as the players, this is a chamber piece about chamber musicians that is set to Beethoven's emotional Opus 131 string quartet — in C-sharp minor.
3:15 PM PST, November 29, 2012
Review: Brad Pitt is smooth, but 'Killing Them Softly' isn't
News reports of economic woes and misbegotten corporate schemes play like a soundtrack in "Killing Them Softly," a moody crime noir starring Brad Pitt as a New Orleans hit man dealing with a down market, bad bets and loose change.
3:59 PM PST, November 20, 2012
Review: 'Life of Pi' is a masterpiece by Ang Lee
Ang Lee's "Life of Pi" asks that we take a leap of faith along with a boy named Pi Patel and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker as an angry ocean and the ironies of fate set them adrift. Their struggle for survival is as elegant as it is epic with the director creating a grand adventure so cinematically bold, and a spiritual voyage so quietly profound, that if not for the risk to the castaways, you might wish their passage from India would never end. There are always moral crosscurrents in Lee's most provocative work, but so magical and mystical is this parable, it's as if the filmmaker has found the philosopher's stone.
2:39 PM PST, November 15, 2012
'Anna Karenina' review: Joe Wright's artifice overshadows actors
"Anna Karenina," director Joe Wright's startling new vision of the Tolstoy classic, is all dressed up with no place to go. Starring Keira Knightley, Jude Law and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the tale of passion and impropriety in Imperial Russian society, circa 1870, the production is bold, sumptuous, ambitious and yet bound by its own self-imposed conventions.
4:00 AM PST, November 15, 2012
Review: Bella is on a tear in 'Twilight' finale
From the moment Bella Swan blinks those blood-red eyes of a newborn vampire, you just know that "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2" is going to be vampirrific. Which is not quite the same as terrific, but for the swooning series that made heartthrobs of Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, it just feels right.
5:06 PM PST, November 14, 2012
Review: 'Barrymore' a showcase for Christopher Plummer
Two things to keep in mind when considering "Barrymore," starring Christopher Plummer as the great John B: It was brilliant as a one-man stage show; it was never a good candidate for film.
4:55 PM PST, November 8, 2012
Review: 'Switch' sticks to energy details
There is a kind of clarity that an academic mind can bring to a complex subject like the energy crisis; there is a kind of information overload that a scholarly approach can produce as well. The new documentary "Switch" has a bit of both as it examines the many raw and refined materials that fuel our lives.
5:32 PM PDT, October 25, 2012
Review: 'The Loneliest Planet' is a revealing journey
In "The Loneliest Planet," the faces and bodies of the adventurous couple at the center of the film's journey do most of the talking, and pretty eloquently I might add. So driven is filmmaker Julia Loktev to immerse us in the couple's existential experience that dialogue is nearly nonexistent and stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg are often little more than specks on the horizon. It's as if Strasberg's Method acting techniques — that focused approach to "become" someone else, all baggage explored and absorbed by the actor — has been adopted by the director.
5:57 PM PDT, November 1, 2012
Review: 'The Man With the Iron Fists' is enjoyably bad
"The Man With the Iron Fists" is a wildly whirling martial arts spectacle with an endless array of exotic knives, a penchant for Zen philosophizing and an unquenchable thirst for blood. It may just be one of the best bad movies ever.
2:20 PM PST, November 7, 2012
Movie review: 'Skyfall' shows James Bond still sharp and fit at 50
If "Skyfall" is the new 50, James Bond is handling it remarkably well. Five decades after the first cinematic incarnation of 007, novelist Ian Fleming's agent provocateur, the spy-craft in the new film is sharper, the intrigue deeper, the beauties brighter (more brain, less bare).
8:00 PM PDT, November 1, 2012
Movie review: 'Wreck-It Ralph' scores big
It's not just the joystick junkie in me that admires "Wreck-It Ralph," Disney's wacky new comic adventure with a lovable lug of a video game character at its center. The movie's subversive sensibility and old-school/new-school feel are a total kick.
4:26 PM PDT, October 25, 2012
Movie review: 'The Other Son' a switched-at-birth story with a twist
Switched-at-birth stories are always heartbreaking, the parents who discover years later that the child they loved and raised is not their own, the child whose identity is upended. Into that already complex dynamic, filmmaker Lorraine Levy has injected the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in "The Other Son."
7:00 AM PDT, October 24, 2012
Joaquin Phoenix can leave Hollywood-- as long as he comes back
It's easy to get lost in the physicality Joaquin Phoenix brings to the role of the disturbed and disturbing World War II Navy vet Freddie Quell in Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master," a performance being talked up as a possible awards contender despite the film's box-office struggles, and despite the shrugging indifference Phoenix has shown about winning anything for it.
3:52 PM PDT, October 25, 2012
Movie review: In 'Chasing Mavericks,' surf's up, film's flat
The killer waves in "Chasing Mavericks" are the thing to watch, the only thing to watch. They are angry waves, monsters — with lots of attitude and undertow. If only the rest of the film had followed in their wake. The story, and even the surfing, just don't hold water against their crushing presence or fierce beauty.
3:19 PM PDT, October 18, 2012
Review: 'Nobody Walks' a provocative, if flawed, tale of temptation
"Nobody Walks" is one of those fishbowl films: an idea is tossed in like a crumb, then we wait and watch what happens.
2:10 PM PDT, October 18, 2012
Review: 'Alex Cross' and Tyler Perry are armed with silly lines
"Alex Cross," the new action thriller starring Tyler Perry not in drag, makes one thing perfectly clear — no one had better cross Cross. Sure he may be a respected homicide detective and a psychologist to boot, which can make for one cool customer. But he also has a really bad temper, really big guns and really bad dialogue. He will use all of them excessively if pushed.
3:04 PM PDT, October 4, 2012
Review: 'Frankenweenie' a Tim Burton homage to horror classics
Tim Burton, cinematic champion of weirdos, outsiders and overlooked geniuses, has long been stitching together broken psyches. Over the years he's taken detours for big-budget reprises such as "Alice in Wonderland," "Sweeney Todd" and "Planet of the Apes," some a better fit than others. In contrast, "Frankenweenie," his new animated riff on horror classics about a boy with a scientific bent resurrecting his pet dog, feels very much a return to form.
3:47 PM PDT, October 18, 2012
Movie review: 'The Sessions' puts sexual healing front and center
The shocker about "The Sessions," starring Helen Hunt and John Hawkes, is not the full-frontal nudity, or its provocative story of a sex surrogate who helps a 38-year-old in an iron lung lose his virginity. It's not even the priest's blessing allowing the out-of-wedlock sex acts.
2:55 PM PDT, October 4, 2012
Review: 'The Paperboy' delivers a dark, angrily steaming tale
Director Lee Daniels has a habit of falling madly in love with characters nobody else wants, out of an underclass littered with sociopaths, psychopaths and their victims. He has done it again in the sweat-soaked noir of "The Paperboy."
6:50 PM PDT, October 11, 2012
Movie review: Latest 'Wuthering Heights' is a stark, muddied affair
British filmmaker Andrea Arnold's "Wuthering Heights," the newest chapter in the novel's long, on-screen history, is so earthy and intent on authenticity that like Heathcliff and Cathy you can never escape the wind that howls across the moors, or the mud, clinging so thick on boots and body that it's tempting to check your own. Even the actors, many plucked from the Yorkshire countryside where the Emily Bronte classic is set and the movie was shot, have faces worn by that harsh clime to match the complicated emotions the author explored.
3:50 PM PDT, September 27, 2012
Review: 'The Iran Job' exceptional in its storytelling
"The Iran Job" is one of those documentaries that is sad and hopeful in equal measure and exceptional in its storytelling. The fly-on-the-wall film follows American pro basketball player Kevin Sheppard for a season spent playing in the Iranian Basketball Super League. It is a streetwise look at the country's political realities — without the polemics — as the charismatic Sheppard forges an unlikely friendship with three young Iranian women. A friendship that could have landed them in jail.
September 30, 2011
Movie review: 'Margaret'
If you know Gerard Hopkins' Victorian-era poem "Spring and Fall," a reflection on the loss of innocence addressed to a young child named Margaret, you have a clue about what writer-director Kenneth Lonergan is getting at in "Margaret." This contemporary lament, starring Anna Paquin, seems partly inspired by the poem, though Hopkins is but one of many literary references scattered about.
February 28, 2011
Oscars: Supporting actor Christian Bale
Is there anything Christian Bale can't, or won't, do in service of his art? I swear, if the role called for a 4-foot-tall woman, he'd schedule surgery. Don't even think about how his chilling serial killer in "American Psycho" was constructed.
September 9, 2011
Movie review: 'Tanner Hall'
Like detention, "Tanner Hall," the new coming-of-age-in-a-boarding-school drama, allows room for a lot of thinking about other things — its cast most notably, since watching their struggle to move beyond the mundane is painful.
4:30 PM PDT, October 4, 2012
Review: Detroit's economic devastation chronicled in 'Detropia'
"Detropia" comes at you with the economically ravaged Motor City of Detroit clinging to its perch like a canary in a coal mine, gasping for breath.
June 17, 2011
Movie Review: 'Mr. Popper's Penguins'
"Mr. Popper's Penguins," a mildly amusing flight of fancy for the family crowd, is far better for its penguins than its Popper. Not that Jim Carrey's Mr. Popper is poorly done, per se. But the penguins are perfectly suited for stealing scenes and hearts as they waddle around and completely take over this farce.
November 8, 2010
An appreciation: Jill Clayburgh
There is a classic Jill Clayburgh scene in Paul Mazursky's "An Unmarried Woman," the 1978 film the actress will be remembered for most in a career that kept her busy with work nearly until her death on Friday. She's walking down a crowded New York City sidewalk having just learned her husband is leaving her for someone half her age, the fresh wound visible only in those eyes, a soft cornflower blue gone stone cold.
November 11, 2011
'London Boulevard': Crime, fame, Colin Farrell not a good mix
"London Boulevard," starring Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley, is a pitch-black thriller with ruthless drug bosses and relentless paparazzi sharing bad guy billing. Would that the movie were pitch perfect as well.
March 20, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'Sin Nombre'
There is much strange beauty in the poverty and desperation captured by "Sin Nombre," an evocative and impressive first feature from writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga tracing both the journey north taken by so many from Mexico and Central America and the gang violence that stunts the lives of the many others who stay behind.
May 6, 2011
Movie review: 'There Be Dragons'
"There Be Dragons," most of which is set during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, is supposed to be about the intersecting lives of a saint and a sinner. But it is a third man, a revolutionary, who nearly steals the show. Which might have been all right if writer-director Roland Joffé hadn't been so conflicted about whose story he wants to tell. But indecision can be deadly, and it proves to be here.
April 3, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'Alien Trespass'
There is a sweet sincerity to "Alien Trespass," a sometimes too reverential homage to the sci-fi B-movies that landed in theaters during the 1950s, channeling our nuclear annihilation worries through an even greater prism of fear: the outer reaches of the universe and the frightening beings that might exist there.
September 9, 2011
Movie review: 'Shaolin'
"Shaolin," with its feuding warlords and fighting monks in '20s era China, is a sprawling popcorn blast of action kept spinning with crazy cool kung fu, tons of fake spurting blood (I think everyone had a packet clinched in their teeth) and slacker improvised, or inspired, U.S. subtitles.
February 28, 2011
Oscars: Melissa Leo
What a mother. Hell-to-pay-if-you-cross-her fierce and with more fire in her belly than either of her sons, or certainly that is the way actress Melissa Leo brought Alice Ward to life in David O. Russell's gritty "The Fighter."
March 4, 2011
Movie review: 'Rango'
A marvelous mash-up of Old West and newfangled, "Rango" rewrites the animation playbook with its eye-popping critters and varmints, and its hero's tale (tail?) of a chameleon desperate for a SAG card and a town desperate for a sheriff. What fun.
February 6, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'Crips and Bloods: Made in America'
The image of a glittering downtown Los Angeles skyline turned upside down, which opens Stacy Peralta's sobering "Crips and Bloods: Made in America," is both striking and unnerving. With that image, Peralta telegraphs a theme that will resonate in chilling ways throughout his new documentary -- that geography matters and that we are heading into a world that's been upended.
February 11, 2011
Movie review: 'Cold Weather'
"Cold Weather," the latest micro-budget movie from writer-director-editor Aaron Katz, is like an exquisite minimalist painting — its beauty will move you, its simplicity will fool you. For there are layers and complexities to be found in the film, like the many mysteries it slowly exposes.
March 7, 2011
Book Review: 'Conversations With Scorsese'
Above all else, Martin Scorsese is a character.
April 10, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'The Song of Sparrows'
"The Song of Sparrows" is a fitting name for the new film from Iranian writer-director Majid Majidi. Sparrows are, after all, the most ordinary of birds: small, brown, common. The overlooked and the ordinary is exactly the terrain Majidi loves to walk, and we see again in this film his deep affection for his country's common folk -- with their meager resources, menial jobs and yet surprisingly fulfilled lives.
July 15, 2011
Movie Review: 'Snow Flower and the Secret Fan'
In trying to give a modern twist to "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan's" bestselling story of women and friendship in 19th century China, director Wayne Wang has been tripped up by his chick-lit tendencies. He should have trusted that author Lisa See's moving portrait of two girls bound by fate, custom and circumstance (as tightly and at times as painfully as the cloth that wraps and warps their feet) would be enough. Instead, he's weighted down the big-screen version with a couple of 21st century Sex in Shanghai-styled BFFs who've had a nasty falling-out.
July 31, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'Funny People'
"Funny People" was supposed to be Judd Apatow's coming out party. The movie in which "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up" writer-director, who has long made his bread and butter on the back of immature guys and their raunchy talk, shows his grown-up side.
December 22, 2010
Movie review: 'Country Strong'
There is a down-home comfort saturating "Country Strong," in that "somebody done somebody wrong song" way, that almost carries you through when its music-drenched melodrama gets predictable. Which is pretty much as soon as the fragile, still-in-rehab country superstar played by Gwyneth Paltrow starts talking about the baby bird she's found and is trying to save. So like, Scene 2.
July 1, 2011
Movie review: 'Terri'
"Terri," starring newcomer Jacob Wysocki and John C. Reilly, is a lovely lyrical ode to high school misfits and the adults they grow into.
February 25, 2011
Movie review: 'Vanishing on 7th Street'
Think of "Vanishing on 7th Street," starring Hayden Christensen, John Leguizamo and Thandie Newton, as the apocalypse sneaking in on the down-low.
February 28, 2011
Oscars: Colin Firth gets a well-deserved win for 'The King's Speech'
Learn another language, live in a different body — that's fundamentally what "The King's Speech" required of Colin Firth if he was to give the stammering King George VI an authenticity that could be sensed in every tortured sentence he delivered.
March 6, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'An American Affair'
Love affairs with married men are always messy, entangling more people in the web of fictions than you'd ever imagine. When the man in question is President Kennedy, circa 1963, the Cuban missile crisis under his belt and reelection in his sights, well, things are just bound to get seriously complicated.
March 26, 2010
MOVIE REVIEW
'Hot Tub Time Machine': A blast of laughs from the past
Who doesn't have fun in a hot tub? Or hasn't tested, at least once, the more-bodies-more-fun principle?
April 29, 2011
Movie Review: 'Fast Five'
Who knew that the best place to put Vin Diesel would be between the Rock and a hard place? The spot has never been tighter, or righter, and the testosterone never higher than in the hot jacking action of "Fast Five."
November 16, 2010
Book review: 'The Elephant to Hollywood' by Michael Caine
Sequels, as anyone schooled in Hollywood knows, are difficult to pull off. The dilemma — how much of the first should find its way into the next? — has confounded many creative minds in this town, so it was probably too much to hope that Michael Caine could beat the odds, though he's made a career of doing just that. "The Elephant to Hollywood," a follow-up to the actor's popular 1992 autobiography, comes lumbering along as more addendum than memoir, more rehash than new dish, but served up with enough warmth and charm that you may be fine with leftovers.
April 3, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'Bart Got a Room'
The mysterious Bart and the mythology of the senior prom as the defining moment in the life of a teenager are the unseen specters hovering over the slight comedy "Bart Got a Room."
February 15, 2009
OSCARS
Appreciating the supporting nominees
In looking at the Oscar category of best supporting actor and actress, I'm reminded of the sort of delicious dinner party that lingers in your memory years later. Although presumably you accept the invitation because you have some affection for the host, it is the unexpected alchemy of possibilities created by those on the guest list that heighten anticipation of the event.
January 16, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'Hotel for Dogs'
Think of "Hotel for Dogs" as a sort of "Mission: Impossible" with canines . . . without Tom Cruise, or the international intrigue, or those scary, slice-you-up-into-little-bits bad guys. What it is packed with is lots of sneaking around, very cool gadgets, excellent stunts and some clever kids, though not in the precocious, all-adults-are-stupid way.
February 13, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'Two Lovers'
Set during a gray Brighton Beach winter, "Two Lovers" begins with the solid shape of Joaquin Phoenix lumbering down a pier, a bag of dry cleaning slung over his shoulder. We don't know who he is or anything about him, really, but for the heavy resignation and hopelessness that saturate his every step. There is no hesitation as he makes his way up and over the railing, jumping into the frigid bay below. But submerged deep in the icy waters, he discovers that he is not yet ready to die.
February 27, 2011
Critic's Notebook: Annette Bening takes the ordinary to Oscar-worthy heights
There is a very particular art to playing the ordinary. Few actors do it well — Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney always come to mind. Of those, most fail to get their due come Oscar night — thoughts of Giamatti and Linney rise again.
March 13, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'The Secrets'
In "The Secrets," filmmaker Avi Nesher takes us into the emotional heart of young Israeli women struggling to mesh their emerging identities with an ultra-orthodox Jewish world where the glass ceiling tops out at marriage and children.
November 26, 2010
Movie review: 'Nothing Personal'
Everything is personal in the haunting solitude of "Nothing Personal," starring Stephen Rea and Lotte Verbeek in this most unlikely of love stories.
January 16, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW
Review: 'Notorious'
There are many things that can be said about Biggie Smalls, the rapper officially known as the Notorious B.I.G., who was gunned down in a hail of bullets on Wilshire Boulevard in 1997 when he was just 24. But the one that fits best on his massive frame is a slight one: flow. ¶ Flow was there in his rhymes, a hypnotic seduction of words weaving and teasing around you like the perpetual haze trailing from his blunts. It was there in the deep rumble of his voice, in the slow, liquid roll of his body as he moved. And it is there in Jamal Woolard, the young rapper who plays him in "Notorious," a performance that goes a long way toward saving a movie that has fallen obsessively in love with its subject. ¶ Mad, blind love is always a hazard in films that fashion themselves as biographies. No detail of a life too small, no moment left behind. In "Notorious," director George Tillman Jr. and screenwriters Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo Hodari Coker have fallen right into the pit alongside so many who have come before them.
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