Screen
Fun with boxing
Six years ago, Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby showed up late in the release calendar and walloped enough fans of boxing melodrama cliches to send it straight to the Academy Awards. Now comes The Fighter, an off-center but exceptional boxing film that I prefer ...
Reel to reel | Week of Feb. 13
About Last Night An updated version of the classic romantic comedy. This film follows two couples from pickup line to bedroom. Rated R. At Century. All Is Lost Robert Redford stars in All Is Lost, an open-water thriller about one man’s battle for survival against ...
Acting skills gone missing
Twilight alumnus Taylor Lautner makes his debut as a leading man in a film tailor-made for him. Abduction puts Lautner in motion and never goes wrong as long as he remains in motion...
Partly sunny
To steal from Mother Goose (don’t worry, she’s dead): When Cloud Atlas is good, it’s very, very good; when it’s bad, Hugo Weaving is doing a drag impression of Nurse Ratched. The ambition of writers/directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Twyker, working from David...
More vulgarity, please
In 1956, not long after she married Death of a Salesman playwright Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe made a movie with director and star Laurence Olivier at England’s Pinewood Studios. The film, The Prince and the Showgirl, came from Terence Rattigan’s drawing-room ...
Breathe in the Smaug
Things you should know by now: (1) All Peter Jackson-directed fantasy films near or top three hours in length; (2) there are deviations from the books because these are movies and not books — I’m told if you would like to read The Hobbit, you can still read The ...
A bit plain, Jane
Since Stephanie “Twilight” Meyers is a producer on Austenland, the following question is fair game: Why are readers who fangirl out about Mr. Darcy from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice embraced or applauded while devotees of whatever-that-sparkly-vampire-dude’s-...
You’ll need a Haneke
Oh, hell no. Why you gotta do us like that, writer/director Michael Haneke? Is life not already emotionally dense enough that you have to go and drop Amour on us just to remind us how finite and precious this human experience is? This is the sort of film you don’t ...
