Screen
Savage deception, revealed
Amir Bar- Lev’s previous documentary, My Kid Could Paint That, questioned the authorship of a little girl’s unusually sophisticated and lucrative canvases, and the role her father may have played in their creation. It was a detective story as well as a highly ...
How the other half lives
To say loyal viewers of The Venture Bros. were left hanging this season is an enormous understatement. Halfway through season four, episode eight to be precise, kaboom! No more episodes. Since each of the previous three seasons was, on average, 13 episodes, fans ...
Charming, in a bloody way
After sitting through the enjoyable but mind-numbingly violent Machete, I’ve come up with a new movie category: bloodbath porn. From the very first scene in this Robert Rodriguez homage to ’70s action films, Machete’s body count surpasses everything since Rambo. Not ...
An unpretentious timewaster
Ten percent to the usual charities?” I love a line like that, smack in the middle of a scene featuring bank robbers dividing up the spoils. It proves they’re good guys at heart, willing to spread it around (if only for the sake of appearances) while blowing the rest ...
Not far enough
There’s an unexpected wistfulness, a bittersweet undercurrent to Going the Distance that could not have been in the script. This romantic comedy co-starring Drew Barrymore and longtime beau Justin Long was finished just as the real life couple was splitting up. For ...
Better than nothing
Set in Manhattan, The Switch is all over the place. But around the halfway point it starts getting interesting and the people who put it together are at least working in a realm of reasonable intelligence and wit and respect for the audience. I wish it were great, ...
A winning ticket
It`s hard out there for a kid from the projects who scores a $370 million lottery payoff, but must wait for the claim office to reopen (infernal federal holiday!). Suddenly he is pursued by “a premature crack-baby felon” straight out of prison and willing — eager, ...
Making a game of it
Most graphic novel-based films shed the visual style of the original work, though a few have tried to present a hybrid view, notably Sin City and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, but Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the first to offer up a unique hybrid where the action, ...
Sentiment overshadowed by glitz
It is easy to watch Eat Pray Love, the pretty, languid film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling journal of self-discovery. Sun-drenched close-ups of asparagus drizzled just so on a plate next to very good-looking bread in Rome: aaaaah. A Balinese beach, ...
An indecisive mash-up
I take notes as I watch films so that I can remember salient plot points, great effects, and idiotic story twists. During The Other Guys, I wrote down “buddy cop film from hell.” That might well sum up the weird mash-up that is The Other Guys, a movie that can’t ...
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 ...
Movie for schmucks
Dinner for Schmucks is a remake for schlemiels, or at least easy marks when it comes to formulaic Hollywood comedy. But the film’s peculiar sluggishness and nagging hypocrisy probably won’t get in the way of its popularity. It has a lot of funny people going for ...