Screen
A surreal take on a classic
Tolstoy’s classic novel of love and infidelity, Anna Karenina has been brought to stage and screen many times, often with mediocre results due to its complexity. Pay attention: It’s mid-1800s Russia, and Anna (Keira Knightley) is married to Karenin (Jude Law), a dull...
Emancipation examination
A humble suggestion: Force the chittering, self-serving partisans in Washington who increasingly prefer filibusters over floor votes to watch Lincoln. Director Steven Spielberg’s latest provides a character sketch, not of its titular president, but of America’s ...
An Ang Lee masterpiece
Being stranded in the middle of an unforgiving ocean is a theme that’s been explored in films as diverse as Swiss Family Robinson and Hitchcock’s surprisingly tense Lifeboat. But being cast adrift for more than 200 days in a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger? It ...
Metal Lurching
To walk in to The Man with the Iron Fists by choice is to give up your right to bitch about story and character. This is a movie written and directed by The RZA, a member of the powerhouse rap group The Wu-Tang Clan; produced by Eli Roth, the guy who made Hostel; and...
8-bit-o’-honey
For a generation weaned on more Mario than Mother Goose, Wreck-It Ralph has been a long time coming. An 8-bit fairy tale with a burly bruiser in the role of the misunderstood princess, it skews a tad more prepubescent than Pixar but shares similar DNA. Writers ...
Will the real Bond please stand up?
There’s no more iconic spy in Western culture than 007, Bond, James Bond, and with a 50-year cinematic history, the 22 previous films in the franchise also represent an extraordinary body of cinematic work. The character of suave but deadly Bond has been played by a ...
Partly sunny
To steal from Mother Goose (don’t worry, she’s dead): When Cloud Atlas is good, it’s very, very good; when it’s bad, Hugo Weaving is doing a drag impression of Nurse Ratched. The ambition of writers/directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Twyker, working from David...
No-town music
At its worst, cinema verite is aimless pretense masquerading as artistic intent. At its best, it is Detropia, a documentary that adds soul to statistics, going inside the implosion of a once-proud city using a sprawling, haunting approach. That isn’t to say that ...
