Screen
2012, will you marry me?
I want the 2012 year-in-film to have my babies. Heck, I’ll have its babies; it has been so durn good I’d totally go seahorse for it. Before I reduce a year that renewed my cinematic soul to a series of arbitrary numbers and rankings, a quick caveat: Because ...
Hazy Hazings
Let’s start with something that’s apparently really, really hard for edgy comedy people to grasp: jokes about rape or the N-word suck, and you suck for using them. Yes, you are allowed to make them; they aren’t illegal or anything. But saying “nothing is off-limits ...
The casino that Jack destroyed
Why would you make a documentary?” kingpin lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a.k.a. the Man Who Bought Washington, asked filmmaker Alex Gibney. “No one watches documentaries. You should make an action movie,” he advised, which, in the best possible sense, is what Gibney ...
Right story, wrong script
Red Tails squanders a great subject, reducing the real-life struggles and fierce heroics of the Tuskegee Airmen to rickety cliché. Some of the action is fun. But if something about that statement doesn’t sound right, well, there’s your chief problem with Red Tails. ...
All the president’s meh
Although he may still be a panty dropper to the baby boomer set, Robert Redford looks like he needs a good nap. The bags under his eyes are scene-stealing, uncredited supporting actors in The Company You Keep, a ’70s-style thriller about investigative journalism that...
From artist to activist
When Chinese government officials unexpectedly detained controversial artist Ai Weiwei — keeping him for 81 days in an undisclosed location — it ignited a firestorm of protests across the world that reinforced Ai’s calls for democracy in China...
You don’t want to ‘Hear About the Morgans’
Pure, communal silence can be a wonderful thing, and if you haven’t experienced any lately, I recommend you see the first available screening of the new romantic comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans? Each of its theoretical punch lines is preceded by an eerie second...
M. Night trips and falls in the dark
According to The Last Airbender — the latest 3-D offering in theaters, yet barely functional in 2-D or even 1-D — the world’s separate kingdoms are built around fire, air, water, earth and impenetrable, rock-hard exposition. Bringing those first four to the ...
Awful, not full of awe
Preposterous, pseudointellectual, poorly constructed, clichéd, impenetrably masculine, goofy and possessed of an indecipherable ending, Interstellar is the mother of all misfires. It is a bloated juggernaut of stupidity, rolling its obese body stuffed with ...
Awful everything
The good news for Paul W.S. Anderson is that Uwe Boll, his only serious competition for worst movie-maker in the biz, has another BloodRayne movie on the way...
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 ...
