Screen
Delightful con artists
Sean-Pierre Jeunet hasn’t directed many films, but they’ve all been terrific, distinctive and stylish. Two you’ll hopefully have enjoyed already are The City of Lost Children and the weird Amélie. With Micmacs (original title Micmacs à tire-larigot) Jeunet moves ...
Hocus poking
If you were to divide your ticket price by the number of semi-nude male pelvic thrusts in the faces of women spectators, each hump costs you less than a penny. At times during Magic Mike XXL, I felt like I needed a “horny translator.” That is to say, when Channing ...
Cross-cultural animation
Five years ago, the Bristol, England-based Aardman animation folks — who created the stop-motion legends Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep and therefore are eligible for sainthood — made the digitally animated British/American co-production Flushed Away. Jam-...
Bright Phoenix
The most laughable part of Her isn’t the complex, sophisticated romantic relationship between a man and his software operating system; it’s the high-waisted, Clint Eastwood-esque pants everybody wears. Forget flying cars; just promise us a future where we don’t have ...
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 ...
A thriller for grandma
The Tourist is a facsimile of a masquerade of a gloss on Charade, and on all the lesser cinematic charades that followed in the wake of director Stanley Donen’s 1963 picture. While it’s fairly easy to take in its retro way — it certainly takes it easy on the audience...
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 ...
‘An Education’ a good adaptation
"Why was I, a conventional Twickenham schoolgirl, running round London nightclubs with a con man?” British journalist Lynn Barber asks herself this question in her memoir, published earlier this year. The question has now led to a movie, which answers Barber’s query ...
