MOVIE REVIEW
Black Swan (2010)
Niko Tavernise/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” arrives in theaters amid a torrent of hype, a swirl of anticipation spurred by the glamorous sex appeal of high-end ballet, sapphic copulation and Grand Guignol melodrama. But what really makes the picture tick is its insight into the performer’s soul, the striving for perfection, the quest for complete immersion in a part that spurs the proverbial blurred line between the real and the imagined.
Continue reading “Pirouetting Out of Control” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1 (2010)
Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros. Pictures
The beginning of the story’s end comes to life in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1,” the seventh and penultimate entry in the cinematic juggernaut. Less a conventional “H. P.” film than a road movie rocked by physical and hormonal turmoil, David Yates’s third crack at the franchise goes to a dark, interesting place, even if the whole enterprise feels rather played-out, so last decade.
Continue reading “The Fellowship of the Horcrux” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Red Hill (2010)
Strand Releasing
You’ve seen every bit of the modern-day Australian western “Red Hill” before, but writer-director Patrick Hughes plays the notes well. From the first-day-on-the-job hook to the backward small town, the silent aborigine killer and the complexly staged shootouts, the film plants itself firmly in B-movie territory and stays there for an efficient 95 minutes.
Continue reading “No Country for a Young Cop” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Wild Target (2010)
Nick Wall/Freestyle Releasing
In a just world, Bill Nighy would be accorded the national treasure status he so deeply deserves. While his firebrand “Love Actually” performance, as boozing singer Billy Mack, attracted some notoriety, the British thespian never has become a household name.
That’s unlikely to change with the release of “Wild Target” – Jonathan Lynn’s acute, precisely pitched absurdist satire about a fastidious hit man – but we fervently wish it would. Never less than hilarious – crafted in the classically deadpan British style – the movie’s a grand, quick-witted entertainment, a throwback in the best, most welcome sense.
Continue reading “Hit Man and Miss” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Conviction (2010)
Ron Batzdorff/Fox Searchlight Pictures
“Conviction” shouldn’t work. The film follows the inspirational courtroom drama template down to the smallest detail, so much so it often comes across as a film-school exercise in formulaic screenwriting. Hilary Swank plays another in her long line of big-screen martyrs, characters defined by the grand moral cause that leads them to sacrifice their lives (often literally). The whole thing, even the thick Bahstahn accents on display, has Oscar bait written all over it.
Continue reading “He Ain’t a Heavy, He’s My Brother” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Stone (2010)
Ron Batzdorff/Overture Films
A cry of wounded, existential despair set against the backdrop of a bleak Michigan prison town, John Curran’s “Stone” explores nothing short of the disintegration of a soul. The metaphysical, religiously tinged Bergmanesque narrative comes disguised in a standard Hollywood inspirational drama sheen, but let there be no doubt of this: The picture is darker, more brazen in its ambiguity and less afraid of experimenting with downbeat sensations than you’d expect of a movie starring such top talent as Robert De Niro, Edward Norton and Milla Jovovich.
Continue reading “Flame With Anger” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Let Me In (2010)
Saeed Adyani/Overture Films
A swell of cacophony overwhelms most horror movies — an overwrought, heavily amplified soundscape of screaming, earsplitting terror. “Let Me In,” which deserves immediate comparison with the genre’s all-time classics, opts for a different approach. Matt Reeves’s remake of last year’s superb Swedish film “Let the Right One In” generates its terror in silence amid falling snow, in a world aglow with the yellowed haze of streetlamps permanently dimmed.
Continue reading “Love at Second Bite” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Leaving (2009)
Laurent Champoussin/IFC Films
Kristin Scott Thomas has never won an Academy Award, and she won’t for her work in “Leaving,” her latest. But let’s be clear: The “English Patient” star is among the finest actors of her generation.
Here, the 50-year-old grabs hold of a sharp — if trashy — screenplay from writer-director Catherine Corsini and lifts it far above standard adultery drama territory. This is not “Fatal Attraction” or “Unfaithful,” movies predicated on guilt, cuckolding and the thrill of misbehavior. Rather, in its star’s able hands, the picture becomes the effective story of a woman opening up and finding the strength to advocate for her desires for the first time.
Continue reading “An Affair to Remercier” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)
Barry Wetcher/20th Century Fox
Twenty-three years after Gordon Gekko told us greed was good, Oliver Stone revives everyone’s favorite slick huckster for “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” On one level, the decision’s a no-brainer: the highfalutin white-collar crime that spurred the Great Recession practically makes one nostalgic for the era of insider trading and backroom wheeling and dealing that Gekko represents.
Continue reading “Greed Is Good for Nothing” »
MOVIE REVIEW
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)
Keith Hamshere/Sony Pictures Classics
Once per year, similar to clockwork, Woody Allen puts down the clarinet, gives away the New York Knicks tickets and comes out with a movie that resumes his career long rendering of the intelligentsia’s foibles.
While the New York icon has found renewed inspiration in western Europe, few of his recent movies that have taken place there boast the literate, angst-inflected writing and smart populist considerations of broad philosophical notions that highlight his best Manhattan-set work. Put another way, things have gotten stale.
Continue reading “More Husbands and Wives” »