Screen
Holy Frenchman, Batman
There’s a moment in Holy Motors when Monsieur Merde, a dirty leprechaun-looking man in a tattered green suit with scraggly red hair, approaches the fringes of a high-fashion photo shoot. The photographer is grunting, “Beauty, beauty!” with perverse glee at his model...
An aquatic beauty and the beast
There’s nothing like a good fairy tale, especially one with teeth — and Mexican writer/producer/director Guillermo del Toro has plenty of teeth to go...
In this life or the next
Filmmaking is an act of optimism. Setting ideas to paper, convincing others to come and join the party, devoting time, money, blood, sweat and tears to capture those images on celluloid, believing those images can carry meaning throughout the world and, hopefully, ...
‘The Twilight Saga: New Moon’: Love at second bite
Filmmaker Chris Weitz said that he knew the Twilight phenomenon had gone off the rails when the female...
Karate chop to the throat
The feverish mixed martial arts infomercial Warrior opens up so many cans of emotional whup-ass that after a while you think: Enough! It’s whupped! It’s whupped! And yet the tears will flow by the gallon...
‘(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...
Itty bitty witty committee
Good news for amnesiacs: Ant-Man and the Wasp is a near carbon copy of the flimsy-fun first installment. Much like the school careers of...
For ‘Shutter Island,’ the wait may be worthwhile
Movies can be like wine: Once uncorked, they don't often last long on the shelf. But Hollywood history could be a lot kinder to the postponed "Shutter Island," and the movie's last-minute date change might actually work to the thriller's advantage...
Wherefore art thou, Magilla Gorilla?
San Andreas and Jurassic Park III were provided abstinence-only education, didn’t use intellectual property protection and had an illegitimate Rampage baby. Oh yeah, while...
Brand Xenu man
Writer/director/demigod of modern American cinema Paul Thomas Anderson — or PTA, as his peeps call him — has a filmography so stunning that merely making a very good movie means it’s his worst one yet. So, with a heavy heart comes the news that The Master isn’t ...
