MOVIE REVIEW
Everybody's Fine (2009)
Abbot Genser/Miramax Films
It’s a very sad day indeed when Robert De Niro can no longer survive the mean streets. I’m talkin’ ’bout you, old man. Halfway through “Everybody’s Fine,” the career tough guy surrenders to a mugger — as if anyone would buy that for a New York minute. He’s Fredo? I don’t think so.
Martin Tsai/Critic's Notebook
When “Departures” claimed an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category, it had already hung on for six months in Japanese theaters, and its DVD was on its way to local stores. But its box-office receipts more than doubled after its Oscar triumph, even with the DVD readily available.
“Part of me wishes it wouldn’t take an Academy Award for the film to get that big,” Yojiro Takita, the director, quipped, speaking through an interpreter. “It was a mystery to a lot of people how this film might find an audience, and how to market it to reach that audience.”
Continue reading “Japanese Sleeper Crosses Over to World Acclaim” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Séraphine (2008)
Music Box Films
The act of painting is a visual one and therefore inherently cinematic. Artists are usually interesting individuals with complicated personal lives and dramatic outlooks — or so the stereotypes say. So movies about painters are visually and dramatically interesting. Except, of course, when they are not.
Séraphine Louis (Yolande Moreau) was a bonne à toute faire (a woman worker who could do anything in the home; literally, a jill-of-all-trades) in Senlis, a small town outside Paris, in the 1910s when she started working for Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German escaping the city life of Paris. They interacted as a bourgeois bohemian normally interacts with his cleaner, until he realized that she painted. As it happened, he was one of Europe's premier art critics, and so Séraphine's career was born.
MOVIE REVIEW
Brothers (2009)
Lorey Sebastian/Lionsgate
This is a war film only in that war is an easy background for bad things to happen. What Capt. Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) experiences could have taken place anywhere, to any terribly unlucky person. It's just that when your helicopter crashes in Afghanistan you are unluckier than most.
MOVIE REVIEW
Me and Orson Welles (2009)
Liam Daniel/CinemaNX Films One
On paper, an adaptation of Robert Kaplow's novel "Me and Orson Welles" appears an unlikely breakthrough picture for Zac Efron. Yet the fact that it's the latest work of Richard Linklater, director of cult slacker movie "Dazed and Confused," is perhaps more surprising. Mr. Linklater's period piece charting Orson Welles's legendary 1937 production of "Julius Caesar" at the Mercury Theatre is an intriguing proposition that unfortunately never really delivers on its promise. While Mr. Efron's portrayal of naïve aspiring actor Richard Samuels will inevitably stir the public's interest, Mr. Linklater's picture in fact firmly belongs to Christian McKay's exceptional turn as the unpredictable Welles.
MOVIE REVIEW
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009)
Screen Media Films
You’re sure to recognize Pippa Lee (Robin Wright Penn). She’s a pretty, devoted housewife, a regular at the stores near her Connecticut home. Her passivity — her devotion to the blandest of routines — blends her inextricably to her surroundings. They seem to have shaped every contour of her life; whoever she once was and wherever she came from buried beneath a sort of high-class suburban malaise.
MOVIE REVIEW
Mammoth (2009)
Memfis Film/P.A. Jörgensen/IFC Films
“Mammoth," the English-language debut of Lukas Moodyson (“Lilya 4-Ever”) takes itself very, very seriously. Were the ponderous visuals, mannered atmosphere and overwrought soundtrack not enough evidence of that fact, the endless stream of scenes featuring actors dramatically expressing their characters’ inner turmoil confirms it. It’s one of those international compendiums with various storylines centered on the same weighty themes, which mean to say so much about the human condition and modernity that they end up saying perilously little.
MOVIE REVIEW
Red Cliff (2008)
Magnet Releasing
Once among the most prolific directors, John Woo has disappeared in the six years since the release of “Paycheck.” With the domestic opening of this streamlined version of “Red Cliff,” the most expensive Asian-financed film in history and setter of Chinese box-office records, he shows us all where he’s been.
MOVIE REVIEW
Nowhere Boy (2009)
Icon Film Distribution
Biopics of musical figures are becoming commonplace. What was fresh with "Ray" and "Walk the Line" is now not so much. And when the subject of your film is famously bigger than Jesus, it’s difficult to bring a unique selling point to your movie. John Lennon inspires deathless admiration for his music, his sardonic wit and his guitar playing. But this movie is not really about him. It’s about the women who brought him up.
MOVIE REVIEW
We Live in Public (2009)
Donna Ferrato/Interloper Films
Well-known investment advice says never to put your money with the early adopters. The first company to break into a new sector will make mistakes that the second or third company to do will avoid, so that's where your money should go. In the same way, the initial idea for new format or style of doing something usually doesn't go mainstream without being watered down or changed in some way (think reality TV shows or anything shown on a fashion catwalk). But without the early adopters, where would we be?
Sorry. No data so far.