DVDS
Trick ’r Treat (2009)
Joe Lederer/Warner Bros. Entertainment
Loyal to a genre constantly attacked for its dependency on remakes and generally uninspired fare, horror fans won’t hesitate to rally behind a good film when one is mistreated. The outcry process unfolds in three stages. The first takes places at film festivals, where too-hardcore foreign films and executive-worrying studio projects enthrall critics before beginning their flights under the commercial radar. Then, a waiting period (average duration: one year at least) leaves fans hungry and agitated, placing question marks on when they’ll see those festival darlings. The third and final stage can go two ways, either with an unceremonious dumping into a minor number of theaters or the straight-to-DVD dispatching of said films. Drivel such as “The Unborn” earn 2,000-plus-screen releases.
Continue reading “Spooking Door to Door” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Paranormal Activity (2009)
Fantastic Fest
The escalating phenomenon that is “Paranormal Activity” carries with it a double-edged sword that sharpens with each additional sold-out show. Made three years ago, writer-director Oren Peli’s debut — a cinema verité take on the old haunted-house motif — has been bubbling into a lava-pool full of hot and bothered horror critics since its initial 2007 film-festival rounds. After a year’s worth of grassroots buzz-building, the film was picked up by Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks this past January. Lame-brained plans to remake Mr. Peli’s product were wisely ditched, leading to an underground wave of midnight screenings that kicked off late September. Its extremely limited run of midnight-or-later screenings has already brought in upwards of $535,000 for the $15,000-costing film, prompting Paramount Pictures to formally open the the company’s scrappy little cash calf in more markets — and at all hours — this weekend.
Continue reading “Whimpers in the Dark” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Broken Embraces (2009)
Emilio Pereda and Paola Ardizzoni/
Sony Pictures Classics
Since the triumphant “All About My Mother,” Pedro Almodóvar has spent the last 10 years making middlebrow melodramas and noirs. In other words, he hasn’t been making those sexy, hysterical and fun movies that first garnered him attention stateside two decades ago. Then again, having a male character in drag was bold and flamboyant in the 1980s. It’s cliché in 2009 — hello, Ang Lee — and even Mr. Almodóvar knows this.
Continue reading “The Flour of His Secret” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Sweet Rush (2009)
The Film Society of Lincoln Center/
Les Films du Losange
“Katyń” appears to be the masterpiece for which Andrzej Wajda, the Polish auteur and four-time Oscar nominee in the best foreign language film category, spent his entire career preparing to make. Although anything that followed would probably seem trivial next to the 2007 epic about the Katyń massacre, Mr. Wajda’s new film, “Sweet Rush,” is just as spellbinding and personal of a film.
Continue reading “Life Incubates Art” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Lebanon (2009)
The Film Society of Lincoln Center/
Celluloid Dreams
“Lebanon” — the newly-minted Golden Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival — is a personal account from director Samuel Maoz, who served in the Israeli army during its 1982 invasion of the eponymous nation now famous mostly for Hezbollah and rocket attacks. But a live-action “Waltz with Bashir” it is most certainly not. The film is in many ways so indistinguishable from “Beaufort,” an Oscar nominee for best foreign language film in 2008, that one constantly wonders what the Venice jury headed by Ang Lee saw in Mr. Maoz’s film that made it so special.
Continue reading “Cooped Up in a Tank, Running on Empty” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Police, Adjective (2009)
IFC Films
“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” have called worldwide attention to Romanian cinema. But they are tough acts for any film to follow, having set the bar impossibly high. So Corneliu Porumboiu faced an unenviable task. And given that both his debut, 2006’s “12:08 East of Bucharest,” and his follow-up, “Police, Adjective,” claimed awards at the all-important Cannes Film Festival, Mr. Porumboiu has obviously succeeded. But — unfair though the comparisons may be — his two films are nonetheless relatively underwhelming next to “Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months.”
Continue reading “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” »
MOVIE REVIEW
A Serious Man (2009)
Wilson Webb/Focus Features
Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) lives the quintessential postwar American dream. He has a nice suburban Minneapolis home, a picturesque family of four and a car all his own. He gets up each morning and goes to work at a university, where he’s being considered for tenure. He’s a pillar of the local Jewish community and fashions himself a success, wholly contended with the direction of his life.
But the year is 1967, it’s the Summer of Love, and the tumult that will upend the social mores of the first two decades of the baby boom has begun brewing. Although “A Serious Man,” the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, only obliquely references the changes manifesting well beyond Larry’s front porch, they’re felt throughout a narrative that finds the bedrocks of the character’s well-heeled life methodically upended. Commencing with quotes from the Jewish scholar Rashi and Jefferson Airplane, the movie brilliantly considers one of the ultimate questions: Is there some order, some higher plan, that shapes our existence, or are we going at it alone?
Continue reading “The Mensch Who Wasn’t There” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Zombieland (2009)
Glen Wilson/Columbia Pictures
In order to survive the undead-infested America depicted in “Zombieland,” the film’s highly-phobic and anal young protagonist Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) adheres to his own set of rules. Scribbled into a pocket-sized notepad, his guidelines range from the obvious (“Rule No. 31: check the back seat”) to the darkly humorous (“Rule No. 3: beware of bathrooms”). The rule that will best prepare viewers of “Zombieland” for maximum satisfaction comes not from Columbus, but his newfound travel partner, Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), an eccentric killing machine who’s the Chris Farley to Columbus’s David Spade. It’s simple, really — “Rule No. 32: enjoy the little things.”
Unwavering in its off-center humor, “Zombieland” packs so many sight gags and droll one-liners into its rapid-fire 85 minutes that it’d be easy to under-appreciate the small details. If Rule No. 32 is embraced, though, “Zombieland” equates to brainless enjoyment of the most well-executed caliber. The horror-comedy wheel isn’t reinvented, but that’s measly potatoes when a main character’s biggest concern isn’t becoming corpse food, but finding the nearest Twinkie. And the payoff of his Hostess mission? A crowd-pleasing “D'oh!” moment right out of Homer Simpson’s playbook. “Zombieland” overcomes its ailments by simply going for comedic broke.
Continue reading “Making Light of the Living Dead” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Disgrace (2008)
Paladin
While most works of literature and cinema centered on South Africa have focused on the experience of Apartheid, Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” — a Booker Prize winning novel published in 1999 — broke from that trend. An urgent piece of contemporary fiction that serves as a warning against false complacency in the post-Apartheid era, it reveals a country still torn at its roots despite the progress that had occurred earlier in the decade.
Continue reading “Cry Thraldom” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Surrogates (2009)
Touchstone Pictures
There’s an interesting movie buried inside “Surrogates,” but it rarely emerges. From director Jonathan Mostow and screenwriters Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato, the film squanders a premise rife with potential on rote police theatrics. A lackadaisical adaptation of the eponymous graphic novel series penned by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, the picture trades in hoary Bruce Willis procedural clichés and underdeveloped conceits.
Continue reading “Virtually Living Vicariously” »