Screen
Crazy Cruise
With Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol, director Brad Bird makes his live-action feature debut, having made a name for himself and a few hundred million for Disney/Pixar with The Incredibles and one of the freshest comedies of the last few years, Ratatouille. It’s ...
‘The Wolverine:’ Better Orient-ed
X-Men Origins: Wolverine was the kind of movie that is released with apologies and finger-pointing. After his first solo stint landed with the grace and majesty of a wet fart, odds were stacked against a sequel for Wolvie. But if Hugh Jackman can forcibly warble Les ...
The Iron Giant
Before the 1990s, animated
family films were in the gutter. Deemed too expensive, too labor-intensive,
their demise was certain. But then came The
Little Mermaid, and a...
Can movies solve our problems?
On Jan. 1, 2020, Wuhan, China, welcomed a new year and a new decade. That same day, Chinese state media announced that eight individuals...
‘Real people love us!’
When Talking Heads frontman, and all around art rock god, David Byrne was contacted by a color guard team looking to license one of...
A portrait of the writers as young men
David Foster Wallace is an ordinary guy. He reads obsessively, eats junk food en masse, is addicted to watching TV, wonders what it is like when Alanis Morissette eats a bologna sandwich and lives his life with a nagging feeling of emptiness. Wallace self-diagnoses ...
When death misses
There was a scene, lo those many (OK, 11) years ago, in the original Final Destination. One of the characters who inadvertently “cheated death” and ruined “death’s grand design” had holed up in a cabin, which then had to be made accident-proof...
Something to see; something to read
Well, that didn’t take very long, did it? It’s only the second week of 2022, and we already have the first great movie and...
Where the coconuts are
Zama — the latest from Argentinean writer/director Lucrecia Martel — opens with a parable: There is a fish, a long-suffering fish, which spends its...
Getting lazy about slackers
The Art of Getting By is a screen romance that echoes its title: It gets by. Barely. It’s another wan tale of an anti-social teen who finds himself irresistible to the sweetest, prettiest girl in school. But the film has flashes of wit and some interesting teen ...
Dull expectations
When an idiosyncratic talent seeks a wider audience for her work, there’s a danger in trading the offbeat for something more on-the-nose. This is what has happened in Friends With Kids, a smooth but frustrating third feature with an extremely good ensemble cast. In ...
