Screen
Missed payoff
Maybe in a few years, the high-flying machinations of notorious Washington puppet-master Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, his partner in crime, will be funny. But even with Kevin Spacey trying his carnival barker hardest in Casino Jack, it still feels too painfully...
Slipping Mickey
Gather ‘round kids and hear a story from the days of yore, a time when artists drew cartoons with their actual human hands and not every children’s movie had covert sex jokes for ma and pa to chuckle at. It was a time before everything was glossy and smooth, before ...
Thank god for Mendes
Midway through one in a manic string of chase sequences in the animated Rio, the uptight macaw voiced by Jesse Eisenberg says, “I would love to go five minutes without almost getting killed.” This is the movie’s strategy: near-perpetual peril, dialogue that’s almost ...
reel to reel | Week of Feb 2, 2012
Addiction Inc In the 1980s, Victor DeNoble was a research scientist at a major tobacco company, where he was given the task of finding a substitute for nicotine that would not cause heart attacks. He succeeded, but in the process he proved something that the ...
Conned by a film
The brilliantly untrustworthy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop reminds us that a film can start out in one direction and then change course so radically, it becomes an act of provocation unto itself. It’s billed as the first feature by the shadowy British ...
Down to business; business accomplished
Getting low means getting down to business, in the parlance of the backwoods oddity played, wonderfully, by Robert Duvall in Get Low. Let’s get down to business, then. This film, calm but full of feeling, relays an intriguing story brought to life by some ...
Realism thwarted
Made with or without U.S. Department of Defense cooperation, fictional films about the American military favor narratives in which (mostly) men buck authority, risk their necks in bouts of jealous infighting and go the lone-wolf route in pursuit of the enemy. Act ...
