Screen
Hocus poke-my-eyes-out
Like a scathing satire of the Soviet Union or a mockumentary musical on grunge, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone sets its eyes on an expired target of cultural derision nobody gives a fuzzy rabbit about anymore. Dressing Steve Carrell in a Siegfried and Roy bedazzled ...
[Ir]replaceable you
If Jean-Luc Godard was correct when he surmised, “The history of cinema is the story of men filming women,” then the French auteur Olivier Assayas’s latest, Clouds of Sils Maria, adds the crucial word missing from that epigraph: young...
Final frontier
Geoff Marslett found cinema through science. During the 1990s he worked as a physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory before turning his hand to...
The Disney ouroboros
It all started in Kansas City with a young dreamer named Walt Disney. Alice’s Wonderland wasn’t his first creation, but it was significant. The...
Inside the hearts and minds of Restrepo
From May 2007 to July 2008, directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington were embedded in the Korengal Valley to document U.S. troops stationed at the base, Restrepo. Their 2010 documentary, Restrepo, was a breathtaking portrayal of what war feels like, and it ...
Forgettable
If you’ve ever seen an online profile picture, chances are you’re familiar with the pursed-lips, craned-neck, supposedly slimming contortion known affectionately as “the duckface.” Total Recall is the sci-fi tale of a quasi-postapocalyptic duckface war between Kate ...
A place for us
For centuries, New York City has welcomed immigrants from every nation, matching each wave of newcomers with an enclave of their own. True, there’s...
Perry gets serious
It’s dated, theatrical and overthe-top. In the 35 years since the play’s premiere, it still doesn’t cut black men a lot of slack...
Sherlock Holmes minus the mystery
While I enjoyed the 2009 Guy Ritchie reinvention of the fabled detective in Sherlock Holmes, applying the same formula in this newer film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows proved more a boring, tedious exercise in special effects and self-conscious filmmaking and ...
‘(Untitled)’ too repetitive
The new comedy (Untitled) has the punctuation and the thinness of a gallery wall label. It wanders the exhibition spaces, lofts and performance venues of Chelsea and other parts of Manhattan, eavesdropping on the narcissistic mutterings — funny, some of them, now and...
