MOVIE REVIEW
The Conspirator (2011)
Claudette Barius/Roadside Attractions
Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator” suffers from some of the the same wooden, point-and-shoot didactic dramatics that characterized the Academy Award winner’s “Lions for Lambs.” Yet it offers a valuable look at an iconic historical event from a never-before-seen perspective, molded to an evocative portrait of high-society Washington D.C. on edge in the wake of the Lincoln assassination.
MOVIE REVIEW
Scream 4 (2011)
Gemma La Mana/Dimension Films
In reviving the “Scream” franchise some 11 years after its second sequel, director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson have improbably found the way to territory that’s even more meta than before. The self-aware characters in the first three films always seemed to know they were pawns in a horror-movie game. In “Scream 4,” the protagonists must grapple with the genre’s rules and those of the franchise reboot, as a new generation’s revival of the Ghostface killer parallels the filmmakers’ resuscitation of this late-’90s cinematic icon.
All the self-reflexivity and layered mirror effects make for an experience that’s of a fun and lighthearted tongue-in-cheek variety, with some notably clever wink-wink twists. In the 15 years since the first film’s release, however, Messrs. Craven and Williamson have forgotten that beneath the dense, fourth-wall-shattering aesthetic of that groundbreaking initial effort was a genuinely scary slasher flick.
MOVIE REVIEW
To Die Like a Man (2009)
Strand Releasing
“To Die Like a Man” opens with a Weerasethakulian prologue, during which two barrack buddies wander away from their regiment for a little butt sex in the woods. The remainder of the film, though, is purely Almodóvarian. And we’re not talking about the irreverent 1980s Almodóvar here — think the melodramatic, utterly joyless Almodóvar of the last two decades. It’s a story about an aging tranny (Fernando Santos) with a thieving junkie boy toy (Alexander David) and a fugitive biological son (Chandra Malatitch). When her implants cause her breasts to ooze blood, she decides to sashay into the countryside à la “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” There are also occasional nods at Tsai Ming-liang and Todd Haynes, but we’re still mostly left in Almodóvar territory.
MOVIE REVIEW
Your Highness (2011)
Frank Connor/Universal Studios
It’s hard to fathom precisely how the makers of “Your Highness” may have pitched the film to the studio executives: Think “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” with excessive vulgarity and gore? Picture a live-action “Shrek” sans the lovable green ogre? Envision newly minted Oscar Swan queen-Mother Leia transforming herself into Fiona the Warrior Princess? Consider an Oscar co-host-daytime soap star-Yale professor dabbling in a film that revolves around a severed penis instead of a severed arm? And how about it all in a vehicle starring the next Seth Rogen–Zach Galifianakis?
Who in his or her right mind would green-light a movie with such a premise?
MOVIE REVIEW
Source Code (2011)
Jonathan Wenk/
Summit Entertainment
As the biological son of Ziggy Stardust, Duncan Jones has science fiction in his DNA. That God-given gift, when combined with the young Zowie Bowie’s grooming on movies such as “Solaris” and “Blade Runner,” might not have guaranteed that he’d become one of the genre’s premiere cinematic purveyors; but if you had to make a futures bet in the ’80s, well, you could have done a lot worse.
“Source Code,” his sophomore effort, is a safer, more streamlined venture than his ambitious debut “Moon,” a one-man show starring Sam Rockwell. Still, the filmmaker derives grand twisty pleasures out of the “Groundhog Day”-on-a-train premise, with the film’s smart contemporary allusions, its protagonist’s stark emotional journey and a Hitchcockian aptitude for creatively maximizing the potential of a constrained setting.
MOVIE REVIEW
Insidious (2011)
FilmDistrict
With “Saw,” Australian director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell created arguably the most successful horror franchise of the last decade. Although the two brilliantly plotted all the twists and turns in that film, they evidently made a huge miscalculation by distancing themselves from five out of its six sequels. Instead of being branded as one-trick ponies, they now run the risk of being known as one-hit wonders.
Four years after the embarrassing double whammy of “Dead Silence” and “Death Sentence” (the latter Mr. Whannell did not pen and only starred in), the two finally redeem themselves with the respectable “Insidious.” And they have done so in spite of many obstacles, not the least of which is that the film’s first major twist is now an open secret. “It’s not the house that is haunted,” the trailers and posters explain. Thanks a lot, marketing geniuses.
MOVIE REVIEW
In a Better World (2010)
Morten Søborg/Sony Pictures Classics
Bullying sucks. And with so many young people around the country and possibly around the world having taken their own lives because they could no longer endure it, the subject is most certainly ripe for cinematic exploration. So the newly minted Oscar Best Foreign Language Film “In a Better World” looks at the phenomenon and all its manifestations: your classic schoolyard tormentor, the redneck fight-picker and an African tyrant who does unspeakably heinous things to young women.
Although this being a film by Susanne Bier, there is unfortunately a good measure of unneeded melodrama stirred in to trivialize the very important thematic concerns. Just as she took post-traumatic stress syndrome into daytime soap territory with the original “Brothers,” Ms. Bier peppers the multiple threads of bullying in “In a Better World” with various domestic dysfunctions involving widowers, divorcees and absent parents.
MOVIE REVIEW
Sweetgrass (2009)
Cinema Guild
“Sweetgrass” may be the most unusual movie you’ve never seen. It is a documentary with no narration, no soundtrack, minimal dialogue and a lot of sheep. Here, we have extreme avant-garde filmmaking: creative partners Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor have created a 101-minute work of art stripped of all common technique and polish. What remains is a slim and imperfect examination of sheepherders in the American Northwest.
MOVIE REVIEW
Red Riding Hood (2011)
Kimberly French/Warner Bros. Pictures
Movies are often sold to studios on the promise of combining flick A and flick B to produce, well, flick A-plus-B or something. For example, “ ‘Dumb & Deader’ will totally be similar to ‘Dumb & Dumber’-meets-‘Sudden Death’.” It’s the age-old explanation for why Hollywood plagiarizes itself with such fervor.
In formulating “Red Riding Hood,” her ridiculous teenybopper-geared retooling of the fairy tale, director Catherine Hardwicke (“Twilight”) clearly couldn’t be bothered to restrict the formula to two movies, or TV shows, or popular trends. Instead, the medieval village-set picture is “Gossip Girl”-meets-“Spring Awakening”-and-a-Renaissance Faire with a dash of “Twilight,” a sprinkling of MTV, a touch of Baz Luhrmann-style anachronisms and all the sweeping helicopter shots you’ll ever need.
MOVIE REVIEW
Battle: Los Angeles (2011)
Columbia Pictures
“Battle: Los Angeles” zeroes in on the least interesting aspect of a hostile, militaristic alien invasion: the frontline combat. The specter and mystery of a sudden and fierce extraterrestrial colonization attempt is wiped away by filmmaker Jonathan Liebesman. In its stead is a full-length version of one of those ubiquitous “Be all you can be” ads, an excuse for a band of one-dimensional United States Marines to flex its collective muscle.
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