Screen
‘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...
reel to reel | Week of Oct. 27, 2011
50/50 Though it’s a cancer film, the tender and funny 50/50 addresses its subject with a refreshing lack of melodrama. Based on the true story of Will Reiser, a comedy writer, the movie follows Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who gets diagnosed with the C-word. ...
Snooze cruise
What’s your level of interest here? It’s been 15 years and 30-plus features — not to mention TV and streaming series — since Iron...
These pictures of you
Helmut Newton had a sense of humor. That might not be your immediate takeaway if you do a Google search for his photographs (after...
You say you want a revolution?
The “99 percent vs. the 1 percent” analogy at work in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire has all the subtlety of a funeral selfie. But it is precisely this lack of sophistication in message that may make this the most zeitgeist-capturing, intellectually resonant sci-fi ...
Being near Emma Watson
Reconciling the public’s fascination with Emma Watson’s blossoming sexuality with realizing that the first time she was on screen she was 11 years old is really difficult. Doing so in a movie where her character’s sexuality is fundamentally warped because of an ...
Learning the wrong lessons
An employee of the Chicago public school system, ha-cha seventh-grade educator Elizabeth, portrayed by Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher, blows most of her classroom time showing her students (whose names she never learns) movies such as Lean on Me, Stand and Deliver and...
Not in the Zone
Matt Damon stars in Green Zone as Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, who is increasingly frustrated by the pointless missions he’s sent on, finding empty warehouses where intel has pinpointed weapons of mass destruction. Leading the government conspiracy is Clark ...
Three came back
Hollywood Producer Samuel Goldwyn said it straight: “I don’t care if the film doesn’t make a nickel. I just want every man, woman and child in America to see it...
‘Suicide Squad’ is messy… but fun
Raise a glass: The magic of movie making is dead.
We don’t just know, “how the sausage is made.” No, no, no. Now we press...
Mary Poppins meets Charles Bukowski
T.J.needs a friend. His mom has just died in a traffic accident. His dad, Paul, has withdrawn into a haze of tranquilizers and group-therapy blather. His grandma is kind but housebound. The school bully likes pushing him facedown onto urinal cakes. The woman in his...
